Localization using Angle-of-Arrival Triangulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical, infrastructure-light indoor localization system using audio signals and AoA triangulation, achieving high accuracy without hardware modifications or user cooperation.

Contribution

It introduces GCC+ for AoA estimation and robust triangulation techniques, enabling accurate speaker localization with minimal setup in real-world environments.

Findings

Median AoA error of 2.2 degrees

Median localization error of 1.25 meters

Operates without hardware modifications or user cooperation

Abstract

Indoor localization is a long-standing challenge in mobile computing, with significant implications for enabling location-aware and intelligent applications within smart environments such as homes, offices, and retail spaces. As AI assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Nest become increasingly pervasive, microphone-equipped devices are emerging as key components of everyday life and home automation. This paper introduces a passive, infrastructure-light system for localizing human speakers using speech signals captured by two or more spatially distributed smart devices. The proposed approach, GCC+, extends the Generalized Cross-Correlation with Phase Transform (GCC-PHAT) method to estimate the Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) of audio signals at each device and applies robust triangulation techniques to infer the speaker's two-dimensional position. To further improve temporal resolution and localization accuracy, feature-space expansion and subsample interpolation techniques are employed for precise Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) estimation. The system operates without requiring hardware modifications, prior calibration, explicit user cooperation, or knowledge of the speaker's signal content, thereby offering a highly practical solution for real-world deployment. Experimental evaluation in a real-world home environment yields a median AoA estimation error of 2.2 degrees and a median localization error of 1.25 m, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of audio-based localization for enabling context-aware, privacy-preserving ambient intelligence.