A Distributed Steered Response Power Approach to Source Localization in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

In wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs), the conventional steered response power (SRP) approach to source localization requires each node to transmit its microphone signal to a fusion center. As an alternative, this paper proposes two different fusion strategies for local, single-node SRP maps computed using only the microphone pairs within a node. In the first fusion strategy, we sum all single-node SRP maps in a fusion center, requiring less communication than the conventional SRP approach because the single-node SRP maps typically have less parameters than the raw microphone signals. In the second fusion strategy, the single-node SRP maps are distributively averaged without using a fusion center, requiring communication amongst connected nodes only. Simulations show that we achieve a good trade-off between communicational load and localization performance.