UAV Acoustic Localization Dataset: 24-Channel Beamformed Recordings of a DJI Air 3 Drone with Synchronized GPS Flight Logs

This dataset provides real-world, open-field acoustic recordings of a DJI Air 3 drone captured with a custom ground-based 24-microphone array, synchronized with GPS flight telemetry. Recordings span multiple sessions across different days and two distinct outdoor locations, including drone-present and ambient "no-drone" segments used to calibrate noise-robust detection models. The dataset supports research in sound source localization (SSL) and Sound Event Localization and Detection (SELD), and was used to train and validate a U-Net-based model that reformulates DoA estimation as spherical semantic segmentation over delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformed acoustic energy maps.

Dataset contents:
Multichannel WAV audio recordings (24 channels, 48 kHz, four synchronized Zoom F6 recorders) of a DJI Air 3 drone in open-field flight, plus CSV flight-log files (GPS position, altitude, speed, heading at 100 ms resolution).
Includes per-session alignment parameters (JSON) and reference-flight recordings used to calibrate the GPS-to-array coordinate frame, plus ambient "no-drone" background audio. Two of the four sessions also include a 360-degree reference video (Insta360 X4).
Companion Python scripts are included so others can regenerate the labelled dataset used to train the model.

Please refer to the README file for further information.

https://doi.org/10.26183/07nm-4p35

Conference presentation: "Beamformed 360-Degree Sound Maps: U-Net-Driven Acoustic Source Segmentation and Localization" (IWAENC 2026)
An extended version of this dataset is available on arXiv [2508.00307, "Acoustic Imaging for UAV Detection: Dense Beamformed Energy Maps and U-Net SELD"]

Rodriguez, Belman Jahir | j.rodrigueznino@westernsydney.edu.au | 0000-0002-6929-4874
Chevtchenko, Sergio | s.chevtchenko@westernsydney.edu.au | 0000-0001-8283-5578
Saeed Afshar | s.afshar@westernsydney.edu.au | 0000-0002-2695-3745

400607 - Signal processing
461103 - Deep learning

140109 - National security

sound source localization ; direction of arrival estimation ; microphone array ; delay-and-sum beamforming ; U-Net ; SELD ; acoustic imaging ; semantic segmentation ; drone acoustics ; UAV detection ; GPS-synchronized audio ; open-field dataset