This week I focused on debugging my circular beamforming code and on collecting data to test the code. I also spent time on the ethics assignment and discussion prep. Over the past week, I found and fixed several bugs in my code. The audio still does not seem be beamforming towards the intended speaker though, and instead seems to be cutting out some noise. In the figure below, Figure 1 shows the output signal and Figure 2 shows one channel of the input signal. As can be seen in the figures, the output looks very similar to the input, but has lower amplitude for the parts of the recording with background noise and no speaking.
It is possible that there are more issues with my code, and it is also possible that our recording setup wasn’t precise enough and that the look direction (i.e. angle of the speaker of interest) that I input to my code isn’t accurate enough for the beamforming algorithm to amplify one speaker over the other. This week, for testing, I brought in a tape measure so that we could better estimate distances and angles in our setup, but doing so with just the tape measure was difficult. For the next time we test, I’m planning to bring in a protractor and some masking tape as well so that I can rule out setup inaccuracies (as much as possible) when testing the beamforming code.
We are behind schedule since we do not have beamforming working yet. In the coming week, I will work with Charlie to write test code for my beamforming algorithm so that we can get it working within the week.