Abstract
Conventional approaches to sound localization and separation are based on microphone arrays in artificial systems. Inspired by the selective perception of the human auditory system, a multisource listening system which can separate simultaneous overlapping sounds and localize the sound sources in 3D space, using only a single microphone with a metamaterial enclosure is designed. The enclosure modifies the frequency response of the microphone in a direction‐dependent manner by giving each direction a characteristic signature. Thus, the information about the location and the audio content of sound sources can be experimentally reconstructed from the modulated mixed signals using a compressive sensing algorithm. Due to the low computational complexity of the proposed reconstruction algorithm, the designed system can also be applied in source identification and tracking. The effectiveness of the system in multiple real‐life scenarios is evaluated through multiple random listening tests. The proposed metamaterial‐based single‐sensor listening system opens a new way of sound localization and separation, which can be applied to intelligent scene monitoring and robot audition.
Highlights
Conventional approaches to sound localization and separation are based on have been extensively studied in the signal microphone arrays in artificial systems
We present a 3D listening system using a single microphone in combination with the metamaterial enclosure (ME), which functionally mimics the listening capability of the human auditory system
A joint algorithm variable sparsity principal component analysis (VSPCA)-orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is presented to solve the multisource listening problem, which has the advantages of low computational complexity and good real-time performance
Summary
Inspired by the frequency-dependent filtering mechanism, we designed the microphone enclosure with carefully engineered metamaterials in order to achieve dispersive frequency modulation. Eight transverse plates and 16 longitudinal plates are randomly inserted between these shells to divide the hemisphere layers into 24 different cavities. The ME can be regarded as the combination of multiple acoustic channel modules (ACMs) toward different directions. The ACM can be regarded as a second-order acoustic filter, which includes three layers of perforated plates and two cavities. The geometric parameters of the ACM, including the volume of the cavities, the filling ratio, and the location distribution of the holes, would directly affect the frequency response (see Section S1, Supporting Information). Due to the omnidirectional measurement mode of the microphone, the coherences between two different directions would be close to 1 without the ME. The above results demonstrate that the variation of the geometric parameters of the ME is large enough to ensure that the frequency response is sensitive to direction
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