Accuracy study on shooter localization using incomplete acoustic measurements

This paper deals with data fusion of acoustic measurements of multiple sensors for the purpose of shooter localization. Muzzle blast and shock wave are the two impulsive sounds that occur due to supersonic gunfire. Depending on its position, a microphone array can measure a complete measurement data set, composed of two bearing angles and the TDOA between both sound waves, or an incomplete subset. In this paper a framework is created to fuse all measurements, whether complete or incomplete. For this problem, a shooter state estimator is proposed and the associated Cramér-Rao bound is derived. The estimation results are studied in Monte Carlo simulations and evaluated in comparison with the Cramer-Rao bound.