Source localization in reverberant rooms using sparse modeling and narrowband measurements

Abstract: We study two cases of acoustic source localization in a reverberant room, from a number of point-wise narrowband measurements. In the first case, the room is perfectly known. We show that using a sparse recovery algorithm with a dictionary of sources computed a priori requires measurements at multiple frequencies. Furthermore, we study the choice of frequencies for these measurements, and show that one should avoid the modal frequencies of the room. In the second case, when the shape and the boundary conditions of the room are unknown, we propose a model of the acoustical field based on the Vekua theory, still allowing the localization of sources, at the cost of an increased number of measurements. Numerical results are given, using simple adaptations of standard sparse recovery methods.