BeamformIt

(The fast and robust acoustic beamformer)

• Introduction

• Download

• BeamformIt-1.1.tar.gz
• BeamformIt-2.0.tar.gz
• BeamformIt-2.1.tar (Includes a few bugfixes found in 2.0 since it was released.)
• BeamformIt-3.3.tar.gz (This version is still under development, some people have experienced problems in some files by using it)
• BeamformIt-3.4.tar.gz Stable version of BeamformIt version 3. It is a MUCH cleaner implementation in C++ of the classical BeamformIt.

• Changes history
• Version 1.0: Initial public version, includes some documentation, a "clean" code and RT06s conf. room example scripts.
• Version 1.1:
• Source code now has its own directory, making the structure a bit more organized
• Some warnings and obsolete functions were eliminated in the source code.
• Documentation now can be compiled directly from the Makefile
• Other bits and pieces.
• Version 2.0: Some fundamental improvements were made from verion 1.1
• Solved some memory leaks potentially dangerous.
• Added a fourth library requirement: libsamplerate and use it to automatically convert to 16k all input files with different samplerate.
• Made the code independent on the input format data. When it is of different format than expected it automatically converts it.
• All temporal wavefiles are format WAV in floating point, little endianness.
• Internal rework of all variables to handle acoustic data in floating point precision, therefore accepting a broader range of input data.
• Output signal weighting_factor and output normalization changed to accomodate the floating point data.
• Changed several libraries to link dynamically when possible.
• Input parameters functions made robust to errors in the parameters passed in. In the previous version the system crashed without an error message if a parrameter was misspelled.
• Added running and configuration scripts for RT06s lecture room data, changed the names of the conf. room data to accomodate.
• Variable min_xcorr used some hard-coded values according to each meeting. These have been eliminated.
• Solved a bug when exctracting multiple channels into independent files. This function has been sped-up by using buffers.
• Solved a bug that caused the signal to groud forever when the input signal was 0 for one analysis window.
• Implemented different levels of printout information to accomodate different uses.
• Version 3.0 (development version):
• Another major rework is made, converting all the code into a more C++ style. NO longer a huge functions.cpp file
• Added a .vcproj project to open Beamformit as a project in Visual Studio.
• Version 3.1:
• Implemented the variable reference channel selection algorithm, which allows the system to switch reference channel to use that with highest quality according to xcorr metrics. You can enable it with do_compute_reference=2
• Some parameters tunning is performed using signal quality tools and some default parameters are changed. In the cfg-files two versions are now present for the example meeting sets, with the old and new parameters.
• Version 3.3:
• Some major bugs are fixed which did not allow to run do_compute_reference=2 with acoustic optimization
(See the documentation inside the project for later versions)

• News
• 27/07/2006: A google group has been created for correspondence relating BeamformIt. Check under the "Google groups" item to browse messages and to sign up. If you are interested in the software, please sign up so that all correspondence of public interest can get archived.
• 29/10/2006: Finally done with writting my thesis! now I can acctually work a bit more on the BeamformIt code.
• 20/11/2006: The first public version (1.0) is out
• 27/11/2006: After comments from "inside" people, I have made some changes to the code and here comes a new version, 1.1
• 04/12/2006: Lots of work has been done in usability to run the system without pre-processing on all sorts of data. Some bugs were solved and many improvements were put in place, leading to version 2.0
• 08/02/2009: Version 3.3 is public, which includes a complete rework of the code.
• 03/02/2010: Versions 3.4 and 2.1 are public. They are basically bugFixes of the code. In the case of 3.4 these fixes make usable the code rework done in version 3. Unless major bugs are found in 3.4 (which I doubt now), this is going to become the only version I will keep improving.

• Google groups

	Subscribe to beamformit
	Email:
	Browse Archives at groups.google.com

• Future work
• Add support for noise filtering techniques (like Wiener) from within the beamforming program (useful when multichannel files with non-standard file formats are to be processed).
  
• I'm open to your suggestions.

• Add support for noise filtering techniques (like Wiener) from within the beamforming program (useful when multichannel files with non-standard file formats are to be processed).
  

• I'm open to your suggestions.