Introduction

Project SoundSight is a handheld, real-time acoustic beamforming camera designed to visualize ultrasonic sound sources in the 20–80 kHz range. The device overlays a sound-intensity heatmap onto a live video feed, enabling a user to instantly see where an ultrasonic emission — such as a compressed-air leak, a vacuum leak, or electrical partial discharge — is originating. The system is built around an Avnet Ultra96-V2 development board (Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZU3EG), which pairs a dual-core ARM processor with FPGA fabric to perform delay-and-sum beamforming in custom Verilog RTL at real-time rates. A 30-element spiral array of Knowles SPH0641LU4H-1 PDM MEMS microphones, operating in ultrasonic mode, feeds the beamformer, while an Arducam OV2710 USB camera with a wide-angle fisheye lens captures the corresponding video. A 4-inch square HDMI LCD provides on-device display, and the entire system is battery-powered via a USB-C PD power bank, making it fully portable. By combining low-cost, off-the-shelf components with a compact form factor, SoundSight aims to deliver ultrasonic imaging capability at a fraction of the cost of commercial acoustic cameras, making the technology accessible to a much wider range of maintenance and inspection applications.