MULTITASK LEARNING METHOD FOR BROADBAND SOURCE-LOCATION MAPPING OF ACOUSTIC SOURCES

A method involves acoustic source localization by capitalizing on the sparse nature of a source location map (SLM). Sparsity arises naturally since one seeks the location of K sources in a grid of G tentative locations where G>>K. The source localization problem is cast as a regularized LS regression problem with a sparsity constraint whose solution yields the SLM. An iterative solver based on block coordinate descent (BCD) is used. BCD leads to scalar closed-form updates rendering the method's computational complexity per iteration linear with respect to the grid size. The disclosed method enables high resolution location estimation with fewer array measurements than classical matched field processing methods.