Time Matching Localization of Impulse Sounds in High-Building, Non-Line-of-Sight Configurations

The time matching method aims at localizing an impulse sound source with distributed sensors, and is known to perform well in presence of low buildings. The present study addresses the performance of this method in presence of higher buildings with mostly non-line-of-sight sensors. A laboratory-scale model of an urban block-size area is introduced and used to generate a statistically-representative database of localization tests based on measurements. The time matching approach is found to be very reliable in localizing an impulse source in the tested moderately high to high building configurations, with down to five sensors. The transposition of these results to real urban configurations is carefully discussed. The present method performs best with a three-dimensional modeling of the building height and of the sound propagation. It is shown that some simple approximations on the building height may lead to acceptable localization results only in particular environments. Finally, a confidence level for each localization prediction is introduced and satisfactorily tested.