Audio-Visual beamforming with the Eigenmike microphone array an omni-camera and cognitive auditory features

Audio-visual beamforming involves both an acoustic sensor and an omni-camera to form a composite 3D audio-visual representation of the environment. Information from the respective modalities is combined in the process of acoustic localization taking into account high level cognitive features of the signals, namely the presence of specific sounds - speech and tones - which have characteristic signatures in specific spectral bands. We compare the results from two systems. One is a custom-built architecture based on the MH Acoustics Eigenmike microphone array and a consumer grade omni-camera (Bloggie). The other is the commercially available Visisonics Audio-Visual (AV) camera. We show that the performances of the two systems are comparable.