Localisation of bird calls in native New Zealand bush using MUSIC and/or GCC method

Abstract

This study investigates the localisation of bird calls in New Zealand bush. Experiments have been carried out to compare the performance of four localisation algorithms using recordings of North Island brown kiwi calls played from a loudspeaker acquired in a native New Zealand bush environment. Four different microphone array configurations have been tested. Experimental results showed that GCC-PHAT had the best accuracy for most array types. Conventional narrowband MUSIC consistently performed the worst, whereas the wideband MUSIC was comparable to GCC-PHAT in some tests however the offset in the estimated angle was much higher. Newly introduced dynamic MUSIC performed similarly to wideband MUSIC, but it did not outperform GCC-PHAT. The small triangle array achieved the best performance by a large margin. The results also imply that the square array shape may perform better than a triangular array when their sizes are similar