With the rapid evolution in the design and manufacture of electronic circuits, wireless nodes that integrate sensors and communication interfaces of different types have become economic resources for the design and deployment of innovative monitoring systems. In this context, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have spread in fields as diverse as security, industry and systems oriented to care and well-being. When nodes incorporate acoustic transducers and the processing involves the manipulation of acoustic signals, such networks are commonly known as wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). Inference of location information has always been an attractive research problem, where traditional (wired) microphone arrays have been employed to identify the number and location of active sound sources. However, practical limitations such as constrained processing power, lack of synchronization and battery life of the nodes restrict the direct application of classical approaches within a WASNs framework. The talk  will cover a brief introduction to this research field, as well as an overview of recent approaches to tackle this problem.

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Dipl.-Ing. Ingo Witew
Research Assistant

ITA - Institute of Technical Acoustics
RWTH Aachen University
Kopernikusstr. 5
52074 Aachen, Germany
Tel    +49 241 80-97994
Mobile +49 175 52 37 536
Fax    +49 241 80-92214
Ingo.Witew@akustik.rwth-aachen.de
http://www.akustik.rwth-aachen.de