Hardware Design of Anembedded Real-Time Acoustic Source Location Detector

This paper presents an embedded system that detects the 3 dimensional location of an acoustic source using a multiple microphone constellation. The system consists of a field programmable gate array (FPGA)that is used as main processing unit and the necessary peripherals. The sound signals are captured using multiple microphones that are connected to the embedded system using XLR connectors. The analog sound signals are first amplified using programmable gain amplifiers (PGAs) and then digitized before they are provided to the FPGA. The FPGA carries out the computations necessary for the algorithms to detect the acoustic source location in real-time. The system can be used for consumer electronics applications as well as security and defense applications.