Designing Acoustic Vector Sensors for localisation of sound sources in air

This paper investigates the design and application 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 Direction 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. Results show that the design of the AVS is critical in achieving 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 frequencies when compared to an existing AVS design and were significantly more accurate than those obtained from a ULA of comparable size.