Low-Traffic and Low-Power Data-Intensive Sound Acquisition with Perfect Aggregation Specialized for Microphone Array Networks

We propose a microphone array network that realizes ubiquitous sound acquisition. Several nodes with 16 microphones are connected to form a novel huge sound acquisition system, which carries out voice activity detection (VAD), sound source localization, and separation. The three operations are distributed among nodes. Using the distributed network, we achieve a low-traffic data-intensive array network. To manage nodes´ power consumption, VAD is implemented. Consequently, the system uses little power when speech is not active. For sound localization, a network-connected multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is used. The sound separation system can improve a signal-noise ratio (SNR) by 7.75 dB using 112 microphones. Network traffic is reduced by 99.11% when using 1024 microphones.