Designing acoustic vector sensors for localisation of sound sources in air

This paper investigates the design and applica-tion of an Acoustic Vector Sensor (AVS), traditionally used for underwater applications, for localisation of sound sources in air. The paper investigates the relation-ship between the design factors and the accuracy of Di-rection of Arrival (DOA) estimates for sources of varying frequency and compares the performance of an AVS with a Uniform Linear Array (ULA) of comparable size. Re-sults show that the design of the AVS is critical in achiev-ing polar responses that result in DOA estimates of high accuracy. For our proposed design, DOA estimates were found to be more accurate for a range of source frequen-cies when compared to an existing AVS design and were significantly more accurate than those obtained from a ULA of comparable size.