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Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person's speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously.
It is called the 'cocktail-party problem'. Typical approaches to solving it have either involved systems with multiple microphones, which distinguish speakers based on their position in a room, or complex artificial-intelligence algorithms that try to separate different voices on a recording.
But the latest invention, described in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a simple 3D-printed device that can pinpoint the origin of a sound without the need for any sophisticated electronics.
The device is a thick plastic disk, about as wide as a pizza. Openings around the edge channel sound through 36 passages towards a microphone in the middle. Each passage modifies the sound in a subtly different way as it travels towards the centre — roughly as if an equalizer with different settings were affecting the sound in each slice, explains senior author Steven Cummer, an electrical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
http://www.nature.com/news/3d-printed-device-helps-computers-solve-cocktail-party-problem-1.18173
[Abstract]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/05/1502276112
[Also Covered By]: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-metamaterial-device-cocktail-party-problem.html
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:33AM
Simultaneous audio streams from multiple microphones are all it takes - a little techno-wizardry to get the right time alignment and spatial location estimates and you can use cell phones to do it.
In the 1950s, they did it with microphones spaced around the perimeter of the room. In the 1980s they did it in stadiums with an array of ~100 microphones mounted below the central scoreboard. Not a stretch to think they've got mobile phones doing it for them in the 2010s.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 13 2015, @03:14AM
party pooper.