An embedded multichannel sound acquisition system for drone audition

TL;DR

This paper introduces an embedded multichannel sound acquisition system for drones, enabling improved acoustic sensing through multiple microphones and wireless data transfer, facilitating advanced drone audition research.

Contribution

The paper presents the first embedded multichannel sound recording system for drones, integrating eight microphones and wireless transfer for enhanced acoustic data collection.

Findings

System successfully records and stores multichannel audio on a drone.

Experimental results demonstrate the system's compatibility with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Wireless transfer capability enables remote processing of recorded audio.

Abstract

Microphone array techniques can improve the acoustic sensing performance on drones, compared to the use of a single microphone. However, multichannel sound acquisition systems are not available in current commercial drone platforms. To encourage the research in drone audition, we present an embedded sound acquisition and recording system with eight microphones and a multichannel sound recorder mounted on a quadcopter. In addition to recording and storing locally the sound from multiple microphones simultaneously, the embedded system can connect wirelessly to a remote terminal to transfer audio files for further processing. This will be the first stage towards creating a fully embedded solution for drone audition. We present experimental results obtained by state-of-the-art drone audition algorithms applied to the sound recorded by the embedded system.