BACKGROUND
Cocktail Party Effect is an ability to keep focus one's auditory attention on a single talker among multiple sound sources and background noises. This phenomenon is due to a complex mechanism including human speech production system, the auditory system and high-level perceptual and language processing. So much attentions and efforts have been paid on this field since the mid 20th century.
The cocktail party effect works best as a binaural effect, which requires hearing with both ears. People with only one functioning ear seem much more distracted by interfering noise than people with two healthy ears, which is where the purpose of this project stand.
The video below may help you better understand the nature of cocktail party effect.
Cocktail Party Effect is an ability to keep focus one's auditory attention on a single talker among multiple sound sources and background noises. This phenomenon is due to a complex mechanism including human speech production system, the auditory system and high-level perceptual and language processing. So much attentions and efforts have been paid on this field since the mid 20th century.
The cocktail party effect works best as a binaural effect, which requires hearing with both ears. People with only one functioning ear seem much more distracted by interfering noise than people with two healthy ears, which is where the purpose of this project stand.
The video below may help you better understand the nature of cocktail party effect.
PROJECT
This project is to design a system to achieve cocktail party effect using a microphone array. The system is supposed to detect the direction of arrival (DOA) of the sound, amplify the single target sound source in that direction with other sound sources filted out or attenuated.
A 16*4 microphone array is the primary part of the whole system, which is responsible for receiving the sound. A proper hardware platform and a well-performed algorithm will be also needed to process the signals from the microphone array and make it run in real time.
The final goal of my project will be to put the system into a real world environment with 2 sound sources at different directions. During the test, we presume that the facing direction is given (see the system as a person). What are supposed to happen is that the sound from the facing direction is augmented or clearer and the sound away from the facing direction is attenuated or hardly to hear after the audio process. The process should be in real time.
This project is to design a system to achieve cocktail party effect using a microphone array. The system is supposed to detect the direction of arrival (DOA) of the sound, amplify the single target sound source in that direction with other sound sources filted out or attenuated.
A 16*4 microphone array is the primary part of the whole system, which is responsible for receiving the sound. A proper hardware platform and a well-performed algorithm will be also needed to process the signals from the microphone array and make it run in real time.
The final goal of my project will be to put the system into a real world environment with 2 sound sources at different directions. During the test, we presume that the facing direction is given (see the system as a person). What are supposed to happen is that the sound from the facing direction is augmented or clearer and the sound away from the facing direction is attenuated or hardly to hear after the audio process. The process should be in real time.