Sensor Networks - Signal processing and network design for wireless acoustic sensor networks

From 01-01-2008 to 31-12-2011

Description

Microphone arrays have become essential in a broad range of acoustical applications, such as hearing aids and hands-free mobile telephony. Although microphone arrays yield a higher performance than single-microphone systems, their performance is limited by the fact that up to now typically a static configuration has been considered, where the microphones are wired, the position of the microphones in the array is fixed, and all signal processing is performed on a centralised processor. Recent technological advances make it possible to produce small, low-power microphone devices with limited on-board processing and wireless communication capability. An enormous improvement in performance and flexibility is then anticipated with wireless acoustic sensor networks, since they enable to use a large number of microphones, i.e. tens to hundreds, at interesting acoustic positions where it is not feasible to put wired sensors. As the design of these wireless acoustic sensor networks is considerably different than the design of traditional microphone arrays and sensor networks, they require both innovative acoustic
array signal processing algorithms and network design solutions, accounting for a large number of microphones at unknown and possibly changing positions, distributed operation, device synchronisation, high network traffic loads and low latency.

In order to unlock the large potential of wireless acoustic sensor networks, this project aims to
1) develop acoustic array processing algorithms accounting for unknown sensor positions, dynamic subset selection, synchronisation, and distributed operation;
2) develop self-organising and low-latency networking solutions for sensor networks supporting speech and audio applications with high traffic loads.

Team

• Simon Doclo, Co-promoter
• Marc Moonen, Promoter
• Alexander Bertrand, Team member

Financing

Funding: FWO - Research Foundation - Flanders

Program/Grant Type: FWO Research Grant - FWO Research Grant