Abstract

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.

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