Performance Comparison between Stereausis and Incoherent Wideband Music for Localization of Ground Vehicles

In this paper, we present experimental results comparing the incoherent wideband MUSIC (IWM) algorithm developed by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) 2 and the stereausis algorithm developed by the University of Maryland (UMD) for the purpose of performing acoustic direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of ground vehicles. We discuss the motivating factors behind the use of auditory-inspired techniques such as stereausis for performing localization, namely, robustness and low complexity. Robustness is important because the acoustic signatures of the ground vehicles can vary significantly under different environmental conditions. We know that a human, with only two ears (sensors), can perform source separation and localization extremely well in complex environments (e.g., the cocktail party effect). Low complexity is important as well, because the algorithm will be used in real-time, unattended acoustic ground sensor applications. With the use of recently developed aVLSI cochlear chips, outputs from 128 auditory filter channels can be used for performing the stereausis algorithm in real time. For comparison, we will use IWM as the baseline and compare the DOA results of stereausis to that of IWM. We show raw DOA results with respect to the GPS truth data of the ground vehicles and discuss issues such as accuracy, robustness with respect to noise, number of sensor elements, computational complexity, and algorithm implementation.