The engineers at CAE Systems in Gutersloh, Germany are specialists in measurement technology for acoustic and vibration applications. They’ve built a business on sound intensity mapping, sound power measurement, data acquisition and customer specific test setups. During their work they noticed a lack of noise control and the effects that noise can have on our daily lives. Their vision of ‘turning noise into serenity’ first requires that the sources of noise can be found, and the group has developed an audio camera called SOUNDCAM to combat unwanted noise.
SOUNDCAM locates noise sources and displays them visually for the user, building a connection between hearing something and seeing its sound pressure. The system is built from 64 microphones, an optical camera, data acquisition and analysis components, a touchscreen control system. When sound waves move toward the unit each individual microphone will measure its travel times and an algorithm takes the sixty four separate pieces of wave delay data to provide acoustic visuals. The optical camera shows the actual objects and then builds the audio / video overlayed pictures and videos. The unit is 34 x 34 x 9.5 centimeters and weighs approximately 3 kilograms. The battery life is expected to be a minimum of 2.5 hours and the camera should operate between -40 to 60 degrees Celsius. The 7 inch display has a 800x480 resolution and the controller is an ARM A53 4x1.2 Gigahertz unit with 1 gigabyte of RAM, using the LINUX for ARM operating system.
SOUNDCAM is an incredibly ambitious tool that’s been under development for a few years. There are several example cases on the campaign page showing a drone flying, a paper clip dropping, a noisy car, and general street noises. The crowdfunding campaign has already blown past its goal and this is a long project, meant to fund a first production run. The campaign ends on May 24 and the first batch of non-early bird units are scheduled to ship in December 2018.