Perturbation sensitivity analysis of azimuth estimation of the acoustic source for the planar microphone array

Aiming at the requirements of quantitative analysis of the array scheme and positioning performance of a practical compact acoustic detection node system, the upper bound of the far-field azimuth estimation error for an arbitrary small-size planar array is derived and the four elements of the corresponding perturbation sensitivity factor with explicit physical significance are determined. It is proved that the perturbation sensitivity of the source direction-finding algorithm to the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimates between microphones can be lowered obviously by means of increasing the number of distinct microphone pairs as well as employing spatially uniform distribution of array elements. Simulation results demonstrate that this study provides a quantitative approach to evaluating and comparing the azimuth estimation performance of different planar arrays.