Only the good skew young

Maybe I was too hasty in thinking that my curve matching algorithm wasn’t going to be useful. I had a few loud booms go off tonight with 4 mics scattered around the office and the windows open. Mics 1 and 4 were by the open window, and mics 2 and 3 were by my computer about 6 ft. (1.8 m) away. All 4 detected at least one of the big echoing booms. My algorithm gave reasonable offsets and reasonable waveform matches once skewed.

Mic 2 skewed back by 5.06 ms.

All 4 skews were in the 5 to 7 ms range, which is right about what I’d expect for microphones that were 6ft. apart on the direction of travel (6ft/1127fps = 0.005324 seconds, or 5.3 ms). Now to be fair, this was pretty much a best-case scenario for my algorithm. These were long, low rumbling booms rather than simply a loud crack. Still.. Mics 1 and 4 heard the crack at the beginning and mics 2 and 3 didn’t, and it didn’t throw off the algorithm.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *