Audio Camera Using Microphone Arrays for Real Time Capture of Audio Images ...

Spherical microphone arrays provide an ability to compute the acoustical intensity corresponding to different spatial directions in a given frame of audio data. These intensities may be exhibited as an image and these images are generated at a high frame rate to achieve a video image if the data capture and intensity computations can be performed sufficiently quickly, thereby creating a frame-rate audio camera. A description is provided herein regarding how such a camera is built and the processing done sufficiently quickly using graphics processors. The joint processing of and captured frame-rate audio and video images enables applications such as visual identification of noise sources, beamforming and noise-suppression in video conferenceing and others, by accounting for the spatial differences in the location of the audio and the video cameras. Based on the recognition that the spherical array can be viewed as a central projection camera, such joint analysis can be performed.