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• Explosive sound source localization through experimental and simulation studies. • Significance of reference microphone selection on positioning accuracy. • Optimization of the number of microphones and microphone spacing for sound source localization. • For distant source positioning, microphone spacing should be at least 0.34 times the source range. • Performance study of microphone array geometries using modified Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The use of microphone array for sound source localization has been a trending area of research in speech source recognition, battlefield acoustics, etc. For such applications, the localization accuracy is significantly influenced by the number of microphones and their arrangement on the ground surface. Thus, this paper proposes optimized microphone array geometries with the optimized number of microphones for positioning near and distant sound sources. Moreover, this paper also discusses the significance of the reference microphone selection on positioning accuracy. Here, the time-delay-based multilateration approach is used to formulate the governing nonlinear hyperbolic equations for sound source localization. The resulting equations are solved using the least square optimizer, the modified Levenberg Marquardt algorithm. The source results for several customized array structures are validated through simulation and experimental studies. Based on the results, this paper proposes that at least six microphones are required to identify a source position (< 1800 m) with 97 % accuracy at lower noise thresholds (SNR: (6 to 20) dB) and 95 % accuracy at higher noise thresholds (SNR: - 6 to 0 dB). Moreover, the paper suggests that microphone spacing should be a minimum of 0.34 times the source range for localization of distant sound sources to improve accuracy at higher and lower noise levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Explosive sound source positioning by using modified Levenberg Marquardt algorithm. • A comparative analysis of different positioning methods. • Modified LMA performance validation through simulation and experimental studies. • A short and wide range of sound source positioning by varying r between 0.002 and 2. • Sound source localization for both indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, a modified Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (MLMA) is proposed to localize the 'point of burst' of an explosive sound source over the range of (0.5–2500) m. The objective function for minimization is formulated through the time difference of arrival based multilateration approach. The developed method uses four exclusive steps to satisfy global convergence along with fast computational speed. The performance of the proposed method is validated through both indoor-outdoor experiments and simulation studies and compared to other well-known methods. The experimental results show that the non-iterative approaches perform satisfactorily only if the ratio of microphone spacing to source range r is greater than 0.30. However, the iterative approaches outperform non-iterative approaches for any r. It is also observed that the MLMA converges globally at least five times faster than other algorithms. The numerical simulation results also demonstrate that the MLMA provides optimal solutions at lower and higher noise thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]