Demonstration of a Multimode SoC FPGA-based Acoustic Camera

The relatively low-cost of the Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) microphones together with recent advances in the MEMS technology facilitates the construction of large MEMS microphone arrays, which are used to collect the acoustic information from certain beamed directions by applying beamforming techniques. The use of beamforming techniques to steer the microphone array response is the principle used by acoustic cameras to graphically display the acoustic information in a heatmap form. Our demonstrator exploits the heterogeneous nature of System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA systems by generating real-time acoustic images on the FPGA component while alleviating the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) bandwidth limitations by performing acoustic image processing locally on the hard-core processor. As a result, a real-time acoustic heatmap is generated, enabling the visualization of the sound sources characteristics.