Blinkies: Sound-to-light conversion sensors and their application to speech enhancement and sound source localization
Robin Scheibler, Daiki Horiike, Nobutaka Ono · 2018
We introduce the use of blinkies for acoustic sensing and audio processing applications. Blinkies are low-power sensors with a microphone and an LED that can be easily distributed over a large area. The power of the LED is modulated by the sound intensity and the signals from all devices can be captured by a regular video camera. We present our design for blinkies and characterize the transmission function from blinky to captured video signal. The usefulness of such a system is demonstrated with two applications. First, we evaluate beamforming informed by a high-quality voice activity signal obtained from a blinky. Second, we investigate sound source localization using several blinkies distributed in a room.