In the first half of this week, I helped Charlie and Larry put together our proposal presentation and helped Charlie edit his script for the presentation. In particular, I worked on defining our stakeholder (use case) requirements and on our solution approach diagram and testing plans. I took notes during Charlie’s presentation on questions that came up for me and from other students and used these notes to figure out what questions to ask Dr. Sullivan after our presentation on Wednesday. After the presentation on Wednesday, our team met up to discuss our next steps. We decided that Charlie and I would decide what microphones we wanted to order and would start on our beamforming algorithm.
Using the advice we got from Dr. Sullivan, I searched for possible microphone array options (including pre-built arrays and parts we could use to build our own). The most important criteria I was looking for were: 1) that we could access the data from each audio channel (one channel per mic) to process them on a computer, and 2) for pre-built arrays, that the mics were spaced far enough apart to distinguish two speakers. Charlie and I met up to discuss mic options and decided on a pre-built circular mic array that can connect to the Jetson we’re using.
In order to start working on the beamforming algorithm, I reviewed the beamforming material from the end of 18-792 and started to look into existing MATLAB code for beamforming. Charlie and I met up to discuss the beamforming algorithm. Here we decided to go with a circular mic array rather than a linear one, so in the coming week we will be figuring out the math for circular mic array beamforming (we’ve only learned linear so far). By the end of the week I aim to have at least an outline of our entire algorithm so that we can start feeding in mic data as soon as we get the mic array. I will also be looking for individual mics we can use to set up our own array, as a backup plan in case we have issues using a pre-built array.
We have a list of all parts we want to order now, and we have clear next steps for developing our beamforming algorithm, so I think we’re on track according to our schedule.