Two Channel Audio Zooming System For Smartphone
This work addresses the need for better audio capture in smartphones for users like videographers or general consumers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing beamforming techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of directional sound capture and enhancement on smartphones by proposing a two-microphone audio zooming system that uses beamforming and block thresholding to enhance front-direction audio while attenuating interference from other directions, with experiments on a Samsung Galaxy A5 confirming improved user experience through objective and subjective measures.
In this paper, two microphone based systems for audio zooming is proposed for the first time. The audio zooming application allows sound capture and enhancement from the front direction while attenuating interfering sources from all other directions. The complete audio zooming system utilizes beamforming based target extraction. In particular, Minimum Power Distortionless Response (MPDR) beamformer and Griffith Jim Beamformer (GJBF) are explored. This is followed by block thresholding for residual noise and interference suppression, and zooming effect creation. A number of simulation and real life experiments using Samsung smartphone (Samsung Galaxy A5) were conducted. Objective and subjective measures confirm the rich user experience.