Experiment Setup

Introduction

We aim to test a localization network using a pseudo-testbed. While it cannot localize in real-time, it will provide more meaningful data about noise and the impact it can have on localization, and will give us a better idea of performance.

The following flowcharts explain how the system works:

The orange dots represent omni-directional microphones. I want a setup with 16 microphones arranged in 4 clusters, with 4 microphones per cluster. Each microphone will have its own channel of audio on a sound card, like the one below:

I will set up the sound card to output a .wav file for every cluster . The .wav file will have 4 channels, which will correspond to the individual members of the cluster. The rest of the process follows the following flowchart:

We open the .wav files in MATLAB, and operate on them using a simulator, which creates a source estimate. We can implement any simulator with the exact same data (.wav files), meaning we can run as many simulations as we want.

Technical Layout

I will be recording in the Smart Spaces Lab on the 5th floor of Calit2. The space available for testing is 90″ wide, 173″ deep, and 120″ in height. It’s a “glass house”- meaning that there are no actual walls, just tape marks on the floor. This will help us as we will not have to worry as much about reverberation.

I will place microphones at the midpoints of the rectangle bounding the room for my first configuration. The overhead view should look like the following:

Each of the blocks represents a speaker stand outfitted to carry 4 microphones like so:

I will make at least 5 separate recordings with varied source locations to test the method with, then try other localization schemes.

Conclusion

This method isn’t as exciting as a real-time test bed, but analytically it’s a better setup, because it allows me to reprocess the same data in the same conditions multiple times, ensuring consistency.