DOA estimation in car for abnormal sound localisation

Spurious noise in car cabinet can be not only annoying bust also indicative of some potential faults. A small square microphone array with 4 sensors was adopted in this paper to localize the sound source in car for fault diagnosis. A new voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm was proposed for the typical discontinuous short-time noise in car due to some fault and applied to direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as a pre-processing stage. Four different time delay estimation methods were compared based on the measurements from a typical passenger. Experimental results illustrate that the VAD algorithm is crucial to achieve robust fault localization performance and the generalized cross-correlation method with phase transform weighting function is an appropriate fault localizer in car