A Comparative Study of Multilateration Methods for Single-Source Localization in Distributed Audio

Abstract: In this article we analyze the state-of-the-art in multilateration - the family of localization methods enabled by the range difference observations. These methods are computationally efficient, signal-independent, and flexible with regards to the number of sensing nodes and their spatial arrangement. However, the multilateration problem does not admit a closed-form solution in the general case, and the localization performance is conditioned on the accuracy of range difference estimates. For that reason, we consider a simplified use case where multiple distributed microphones capture the signal coming from a near field sound source, and discuss their robustness to the estimation errors. In addition to surveying the relevant bibliography, we present the results of a small-scale benchmark of few "mainstream" multilateration algorithms, based on an in-house Room Impulse Response dataset.