Cost Effective COTS Microphone Array for Range Safety Applications

Abstract

In range safety and surveillance applications, it is helpful to have an array of sensitive, directional microphones. Using beamforming and feature extraction, one can use such an array to locate, track, and identify a variety of targets. This paper describes how one can construct such an array from sub-arrays of small, inexpensive, commercial off-the-shelf microphones. Each sub-array consists of a few dozen electrets condenser microphones which are closely spaced. The analog signals from the microphones are summed, digitized, and then combined with signals from other sub-arrays using a field programmable gate array device. The digital signal is then passed to a general purpose computer for further analysis.