tacost: Testing and simulating the performance of acoustic tracking systems

Abstract

tacost is a Python package to allow the testing of acoustic tracking systems. While many microphone array systems have been characterised analytically and experimentally - these are time-intensive methods. tacost provides a simulation based framework to rapidly assess the tracking behaviour of multiple array geometries, and the dissection of other relevant parameters. This paper explains briefly the design of the package and highlights two example use cases in which the tracking accuracy of different microphone geometries are characterised.