Cloud-Based Acoustic Beamforming Emulator for FPGA-Based Sound Source Localization

Acoustic beamforming techniques are often used
in applications involving microphone arrays such as sonar,
binaural hearing aid devices and acoustic indoor localisation. The
beamforming methods utilized describe results for a particular
array within a given acoustic frequency domain. Software and
toolboxes running locally facilitating the theoretical design of
such implementations are largely available. However, a multiuser cloud-based beamforming approach to generate results
could not be found. Also, generating packages facilitating the
implementation on FPGAs has not been carried out to our
knowledge. In order to alleviate these shortcomings, we propose a
scalable cloud-based accessible multi-user beamforming emulator
where users launch emulations based on acoustic beamforming
for microphone arrays. Users create, upload, modify and run
beamforming emulations. Our platform is also able to generate
VHDL packages containing delaying tables which facilitates the
implementation of HDL based Delay-and-Sum beamformers.
Analysis based on algorithm truncation errors are also possible
due to the integration of fixed-point signal processing algorithms.
Microphones in a given array can be disabled in order to estimate
the response of the remaining microphones during power saving.
Results and packages can be downloaded from the user web
interface as an archive file. Our Emulator can be configured
to take several user defined configurations into account such
as microphone arrays, sound source placement and emulation
parameters. Graphs such as waterfall diagrams and directivity
showing the quality of the beamforming can also be generated