Video Controlled Beam Steering for Sensor Array Noise Cancellation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing voice communication systems face challenges in effectively canceling background noise, especially in noisy environments, due to the distance between microphones and users, leading to increased pickup of unwanted sounds like music and speech.
Innovation Solution
A beam steering mechanism with adaptive filtering capabilities, utilizing a sensor array that includes microphones and a video camera, applies averaging and adaptive filters to digitized input signals, continuously updating filter coefficients based on signal-to-noise ratio, beam calculations, and noise estimation to electronically steer the microphone's beam and reduce background noise.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Volume of moving object
If microphones are placed at a greater distance from the user to accommodate compact device design, then device compactness is improved, but background noise pickup increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides the audio capture function into multiple microphones arranged in an array, with each microphone capturing audio from a specific spatial sector. This segmentation allows the system to maintain compact dimensions while achieving effective noise cancellation through spatial diversity and adaptive beamforming across the segmented microphone channels.
2Volume of moving object
If microphones are positioned closer together to reduce device size, then device compactness is improved, but noise cancellation performance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs dynamic adaptive filtering that continuously adjusts filter coefficients based on real-time analysis of audio signals from multiple microphones. This dynamic adaptation allows the system to maintain effective noise cancellation performance even with closely spaced microphones by electronically optimizing the beamforming pattern according to current acoustic conditions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the parameters of the audio processing by applying different filter coefficients to the microphone signals based on calculated beam patterns and noise estimates. These parameter changes in the digital signal processing domain compensate for the physical constraints of compact microphone spacing, maintaining noise cancellation effectiveness through software-based optimization.
3Reliability
If adaptive filtering is applied to continuously update filter coefficients, then noise cancellation performance is improved, but computational complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies adaptive filtering selectively and partially by focusing computational resources on the most significant noise components and frequency ranges. Rather than processing all audio data with full adaptive filtering, the system applies filtering where it provides the most benefit, reducing overall computational complexity while maintaining effective noise cancellation for the dominant noise sources.
Data Source
AI summary
Disclosed is a video controlled beam steering mechanism for an adaptive filter in a sensor array system that receives input from a target and applies an averaging filter and appropriately steers the beam. An adaptive filter is then used if the SNR of the output of the averaging filter reaches a threshold.