Acoustic MEMS array embedded in a scalable real-time data acquisition and signal processing platform

Most sophisticated systems utilizing sound and ultrasound require enhanced data acquisition and signal processing capabilities. Applications such as sound source localization, acoustic tracking, sonar, and acoustic medical imaging require powerful systems that can deliver, in real-time, the complex calculations required by state of the art processing algorithms.;Microphone arrays are advantageous compared with single microphones in the sense that they can use the physical spatial information of sound propagation to provide more information of incoming acoustic waves, and therefore yield precise information about its source.;In order to address the above concerns, a novel, flexible, and expandable data acquisition system architecture with a real-time signal processing capability was developed. The flexible and scalable nature of the architecture makes possible a wide variety of system solutions that are based on a set of system components.;Associated with the data acquisition architecture a specially designed acoustic array was built and embedded on the system to solve problems related to acoustic source localization, and to prove this new data acquisition concept. The hardware architecture presented on this work is called CAPTAN (Compact And Programmable daTa Acquisition Node), and the acoustic array embedded on the system is called AMA (Acoustic MEMS Array).;The AMA array takes full advantage of the CAPTAN architecture, and in this way it is fully scalable and planned to work on real-time applications. This unique combination gives the system many possible configurations where sound source separation and localization were the ones implemented in this work.;In order for the system implement multi-source localization and separation an algorithm capable of isolating multiple sound sources and provide estimation of its position was developed. The algorithm is based on Independent Component Analysis, its capabilities, and the use of unique hardware features of the architecture are described in detail. Furthermore, results from tests performed with the system in several different situations are presented and analysed.