Following with the R&D Conference series in the Department of Computer Science, this Friday 5th of May at 15:00 in the classroom 2.1 of the ETSE – UV, it will take place the conference called “Sound Localization and Identification in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks” presented by Prof. Dr. Máximo Cobos, Prof. Dr. Juan J. Perez Solano and Ph.D. student Irene Martín Morato of the HiPIS research group.

With the rapid development in fields like circuit design and manufacturing, wireless nodes incorporating a variety of sensors and communication interfaces have become economical resources for the design of innovative monitoring systems. Networks of such type of devices, referred to as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), have been widely spread and used in many fields, with applications ranging from surveillance and military deployments to industrial and health-care systems.

When the nodes incorporate acoustic transducers and the processing involves the manipulation of audio signals, the resulting network is usually referred to as a wireless acoustic sensor network (WASN). While traditional sensor networks have performed localization tasks using the power of the RF signals received by the nodes, the smaller propagation speed of sound leads to better localization accuracy in wireless acoustic sensor networks. This feature has promoted research using distributed acoustic sensors, not only for localizing sources in the space, but also to auto-locate the nodes of the network.

On the other hand, given the low cost of acoustic sensors and the high power of the nodes, the interest for machine learning techniques applied to the identification of sounds in the environment has been highly increased in the last years. Applications in areas such as smart cities, ambient assisted living or automatic tagging for multimedia content has made of these techniques a field with great research and transfer potential.

The talk will discuss the fundamentals of the above technologies, its application fields and the contributions of the HiPIS research group in this topic.