Data-Intensive Sound Acquisition System with Large-scale Microphone Array

We propose a microphone array network that realizes ubiquitous sound acquisition. Several nodes with 16 microphones are connected to form a novel huge sound acquisition system, which carries out voice activity detection (VAD), sound source localization, and sound enhancement. The three operations are distributed among nodes. Using the distributed network, we produce a lowtraffic data-intensive array network. To manage node power consumption, VAD is implemented. The system uses little power when speech is not active. For sound localization, a network-connected multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is used. The experimental result of the sound-source enhancement shows a signal-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of 7.75 dB using 112 microphones. Network traffic is reduced by 99.11% when using 1,024 microphones.