DIY Acoustic Camera

I&#x27;m not the original author, however, ages ago I invented what&#x27;s now being called &quot;acoustic camera&quot;. (Specifically, the SOTA on the math side for precision, accuracy.)<p>The resolution is fine enough that with COTS parts, I can record my signature simply by sketching it out with my fingernail on a table.<p>Every few years I dust this off and play with it, wondering if there&#x27;s some application or other way to &quot;turn this into money&quot; (an increasing concern in the coming months...&lt;tiny&gt;PLZ HIRE ME&lt;&#x2F;&gt;), but I&#x27;m not a &quot;product guy&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ll answer some questions about the technology, but would really love to know if anyone here has advice on somehow using this achievement to pay rent. :)

Combining this with Motion Amplification&#x2F;Video Magnification [1] could result in some very interesting visuals and applications for factory equipment.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rEoc0YoALt0</a> Explainer Youtube video about Motion Amplification

Stupid idea(?): Back-project onto some sunglasses (or corners&#x2F;edge for behind), and give deaf people some basic level of sound-based situational awareness. Combine with some voice -&gt; text tech, and you could have something pretty interesting.

One application for those that I think might be interesting is to record a scene and retain all of the raw audio. On playback, allow people to click on parts of the image and use beamforming to focus on that part of the audio.<p>Does anyone know if the array used here supports timestamped samples and&#x2F;or clock sync to support multiple arrays? Or is it a single 16-channel stream?<p>Having done some very primitive dabbling with this stuff, the DSP programming is always the most interesting part to me. These folks are killing it with some really cool 3D scanning integration to the acoustic analysis<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;gfaitechgmbh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;gfaitechgmbh</a>

Is it possible to tune this to specific frequencies to detect mosquitos? Their audio signal is pretty weak but its also a very specific frequency. This would definitely help in the hunting and killing of the little bastards.

Coupled with a VR headset, this would recreate the sound goggles that were featured in the halloween Magic School Bus special 30 or so years ago.

FYI if you put your microphones in a random pattern you can reduce aliasing artefacts. It&#x27;s basically the same as dithering &#x2F; noise shaping.

This could be really useful for finding birds in trees when I&#x27;m out with my camera...

Is this sensitive enough to find flying insects in a room?

Actual information on how it&#x27;s done is here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acoular.org&#x2F;literature&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acoular.org&#x2F;literature&#x2F;index.html</a>

fwiw they did this in world war I with microphone arrays + seismometer tape (picture of tape on p5)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acousticstoday.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;Battlefield-Acoustics-in-the-First-World-War-Artillery-Location-Richard-Daniel-Costley-Jr..pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acousticstoday.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;Battle...</a>

Based on my experience building corrscope, I feel this is the kind of project that will outgrow Python once you want to implement your own low-level algorithms, make it embeddable or shippable as an application, or parallelize it. I wonder what&#x27;s the easiest way to port Python DSP code and UIs to a compiled&#x2F;etc. language.

I&#x27;d like to see this done with a single microphone and a moving &#x27;sound mirror&#x27; like a fan.<p>The fan blades should cause doppler shift and changing amplitude that varies based on the location of the sound.<p>I suspect that after just a few seconds, this would give better information than an array of 16 microphones.

Are there any inexpensive microphone arrays?<p>I was interested in making my own alexa-like device, but it seems mic arrays are sooooo expensive - more than the cost of an alexa device for the least expensive one i can find :&#x2F;

It would be interesting to see how well this could detect non incident sounds - for instance detecting reflective&#x2F;resonant hotspots in an audio mixing&#x2F;recording room.

I feel like there has to be a cheaper way to do this than a $275 acoustic array. It&#x27;s only 16 elements. You couldn&#x27;t do this with 16 cheap microphones?

wow this is amazing. i directly work in automotive and we use super expensive stuff which does exactly this (for 500k) lol

This is super cool. I was thinking about making a 4x4 mems mic array on pcb exactly like that one. I had no idea you could just buy one off the shelf these days. Has anyone put four together to make a 64 mic 3D acoustic camera?

finally hardware to nail the guy who leans on his car horn outside my place

Awesome work! How computationally intensive is Acoular &#x2F; how complex would doing this from a live feed instead of recorded files be? Thanks for posting your project.

I imagine this + AR glasses can become quite the lifesaver for deaf folks. Throw in some voice recognition and you can have real-life speech bubbles!

Am I understanding it correctly that this is not using anything analogous to a lens? How does this not need a lens when optical cameras need them?

Could this work underwater? Would be interesting to have a acoustic tracking system for diver safety.

That&#x27;s pretty cool as far as adding to a sensor fusion stack

I&#x27;d like to see a video with an acoustic mirror.