We present a novel, reflection-aware method for 3D sound localization in indoor environments. Unlike prior approaches, which are mainly based on continuous sound signals from a stationary source, our formulation is designed to localize the position instantaneously from signals within a single frame. We consider direct sound and indirect sound signals that reach the microphones after reflecting off surfaces such as ceilings or walls. We then generate and trace direct and reflected acoustic paths using inverse acoustic ray tracing and utilize these paths with Monte Carlo localization to estimate a 3D sound source position. We have implemented our method on a robot with a cube-shaped microphone array and tested it against different settings with continuous and intermittent sound signals with a stationary or a mobile source. Across different settings, our approach can localize the sound with an average distance error of 0.8 m tested in a room of 7 m by 7 m area with 3 m height, including a mobile and non-line-of-sight sound source. We also reveal that the modeling of indirect rays increases the localization accuracy by 40% compared to only using direct acoustic rays.

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We present a novel sound localization algorithm for a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) sound source in indoor environments. Our approach exploits the diffraction properties of sound waves as they bend around a barrier or an obstacle in the scene. We combine a ray tracing based sound propagation algorithm with a Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) model, which simulate bending effects by placing a virtual sound source on a wedge in the environment. We precompute the wedges of a reconstructed mesh of an indoor scene and use them to generate diffraction acoustic rays to localize the 3D position of the source. Our method identifies the convergence region of those generated acoustic rays as the estimated source position based on a particle filter. We have evaluated our algorithm in multiple scenarios consisting of a static and dynamic NLOS sound source. In our tested cases, our approach can localize a source position with an average accuracy error, 0.7m, measured by the L2 distance between estimated and actual source locations in a 7m×7m×3m room. Furthermore, we observe 37% to 130% improvement in accuracy over a state-of-the-art localization method that does not model diffraction effects, especially when a sound source is not visible to the robot.

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