On Distributed Sensing and Adversarial Localization of Narrowband Acoustic Sources for Offshore Data Center Monitoring

Overview & Synopsis

This report investigates an acoustic surveillance framework for localizing and tracking narrowband adversarial acoustic sources that threaten offshore data centers. Unlike conventional sound source localization (SSL) methods that rely on broadband signals and compact receiver arrays, the considered scenario involves narrowband emissions and sparse sensors. In such scenarios, the observed time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements are aliased and produce an ambiguous solution space, rendering conventional localization methods ineffective. To address this challenge, we integrate a mobile receiver that temporarily forms anchor pairs with selected fixed receivers, constraining the feasible solution space. The proposed two-stage pipeline first estimates the initial source position using anchor constraints, then initializes a particle filter that jointly tracks source position and velocity using one live anchor measurement and quality-adaptive fixed-pair measurements. We evaluate the proposed method through Monte Carlo acoustic simulations, ROS-Gazebo robotic demonstrations, and open-water field experiments. Our framework achieves a localization success rate of 91% in simulation, while 9 of 10 field trials show tracking error below 2m under receiver-position uncertainty and noisy sensing conditions. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of passive acoustic surveillance for protecting large-scale infrastructure against acoustic threats.