Affine Structure From Sound

Sebastian Thrun

We consider the problem of localizing a set of microphones together with a set of external acoustic events (e.g., hand claps), emitted at unknown times and unknown locations. We propose a solution that approximates this problem under an ``orthocoustic'' model defined in the calculus of affine geometry, and that relies on SVD to recover the affine structure of the problem. We then define low-dimensional optimization techniques for embedding the solution into Euclidean geometry, and further techniques for recovering the locations and emission times of the acoustic events. The approach is useful for the calibration of ad-hoc microphone arrays and sensor networks (though it requires centralized computation).

The full paper is available in PDF and gzipped Postscript

@INPROCEEDINGS{Thrun05c,
  AUTHOR	= {S. Thrun},
  TITLE		= {Affine Structure From Sound},
  YEAR		= {2005},
  BOOKTITLE	= {Proceedings of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)},
  PUBLISHER	= {MIT Press},
  ADDRESS	= {Cambridge, MA}
}