The most significant risk that can jeopardize our project is how to receive more than 2 channels of audio input. We are currently thinking of two solutions. The first solution is to purchase a prebuilt microphone array, and then design complex speech separation algorithms (since we cannot adjust the distance of the microphones). The second solution is to purchase a USB hub, and wire USB microphones to the hub. This allows us to design less complex beamforming algorithms, since we can vary the positions of the microphones. The current plan is to first use the prebuilt microphone array with complex algorithms, and if that does not work, we can still use our complex algorithm on top of the flexibility of altering the positions of the microphones.
One of the changes that we made is to purchase a prebuilt microphone array instead of building one ourselves. This is because we do not know how to create multichannel inputs by soldering microphones. We also adopted this suggestion from Professor Sullivan. Just in case, we purchased multiple such boards to test, so that increased our spending slightly.
No changes have been made to our current schedule that we discussed in the proposal presentation.
Photos of our current progress can be found on Charlie’s report. This week we primarily worked on our proposal presentation. Therefore, we do not have many design graphics to show.