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Last Updated: 20060405, tendeloo
Sunday, May 21, 18:45 — 20:15HEYSER LECTURE
Spatially-Selective Sound Capture
Jim Flanagan
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
As high-speed communication becomes globally pervasive, activities such as corporate conferencing and Internet learning proliferate. Increasingly of interest is good-quality sound capture for meeting rooms, auditoria, and lecture halls. Speech interaction between remote groups, and lectures from multiple moving talkers, render tethered and encumbering body-worn or hand-held transducers inappropriate. Sound capture at a distance, with spatial resolution sufficient to separate competing sources (and perhaps provide perceptual advantages similar to those of human binaural localization and lateralization) is a central interest. This lecture reviews some of the issues in sound capture under degradations imposed by reverberation and noise interference. Major points include: location of sound sources; identification of signal character (speech, music, noise); and, selective capture of desired sources. Earlier work on auto-directive delay-sum beamforming for large arrays (400 electret microphones) and later experiments with time-reversal matched filtering are mentioned. Audio and video recordings illustrate results.
