scholarly journals Assembling cheap, high-performance microphones for recording terrestrial wildlife: the Sonitor system

F1000Research ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1984
Author(s):  
Kevin Darras ◽  
Bjørn Kolbrek ◽  
Andreas Knorr ◽  
Volker Meyer ◽  
Mike Zippert ◽  
...  

Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires sound recording systems. Several cheap, high-performance, or open-source solutions currently exist for recording soundscapes, but all rely on commercial microphones. Commercial microphones are relatively expensive, specialized for particular taxa, and often have incomplete technical specifications. We designed Sonitor, an open-source microphone system to address all needs of ecologists that sample terrestrial wildlife acoustically. We evaluated the cost and durability of our system and measured trade-offs that are seldom acknowledged but which universally limit microphones' functions: weatherproofing versus sound attenuation, windproofing versus transmission loss after rain, signal loss in long cables, and analog sound amplification versus directivity with acoustic horns. We propose five microphone configurations suiting different budgets (from 8 to 33 EUR per unit), and fulfilling different sound quality and flexibility requirements. The Sonitor system consists of sturdy acoustic sensors that cover the entire sound frequency spectrum of sonant terrestrial wildlife at a fraction of the cost of commercial microphones.

F1000Research ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Darras ◽  
Bjørn Kolbrek ◽  
Andreas Knorr ◽  
Volker Meyer

Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires microphones. Several cheap, high-performance open-source solutions currently exist for recording sounds, but all of them are still reliant on commercial microphones. Commercial microphones are relatively expensive, specialized on particular taxa, and often have opaque technical specifications. We designed Sonitor, an open-source microphone system to address all needs of ecologists that sample terrestrial wildlife acoustically. We evaluated the cost of our system and measured trade-offs that are seldom acknowledged but which universally limit microphones' functions: weatherproofing versus sound attenuation, windproofing versus transmission loss after rain, signal loss in long cables, and analog sound amplification and directivity with acoustic horns. We propose three microphone configurations suiting different budgets, sound qualities, and flexibility requirements, which all cover the entire sound frequency spectrum of sonant terrestrial wildlife at a fraction of the cost of commercial microphones.


F1000Research ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1984
Author(s):  
Kevin Darras ◽  
Bjørn Kolbrek ◽  
Andreas Knorr ◽  
Volker Meyer ◽  
Mike Zippert

Passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife requires sound recording systems. Several cheap, high-performance open-source solutions currently exist for recording soundscapes, but all of them are still reliant on commercial microphones. Commercial microphones are relatively expensive, specialized for particular taxa, and often have incomplete technical specifications. We designed Sonitor, an open-source microphone system to address all needs of ecologists that sample terrestrial wildlife acoustically. We evaluated the cost and durability of our system and measured trade-offs that are seldom acknowledged but which universally limit microphones' functions: weatherproofing versus sound attenuation, windproofing versus transmission loss after rain, signal loss in long cables, and analog sound amplification versus directivity with acoustic horns. We propose five microphone configurations suiting different budgets (from 8 to 33 EUR per unit), and fulfilling different sound quality and flexibility requirements. The Sonitor system consists of sturdy acoustic sensors that cover the entire sound frequency spectrum of sonant terrestrial wildlife at a fraction of the cost of commercial microphones.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Robie

XML is widely used for messaging applications. Message-oriented Middleware (MOM) is a natural fit for XML messaging, but it has been plagued by a lack of standards. Each vendor's system uses its own proprietary protocols, so clients from one system generally can not communicate with servers from another system. Developers who are drawn to XML because it is simple, open, interoperable, language independent, and platform independent often use REST for messaging because it shares the same virtues. When XML developers need high-performance, guaranteed delivery, transactions, security, management, asynchronous notification, or direct support for common messaging paradigms like point-to-point, broadcast, request/response, and publish/subscribe, they have been forced to sacrifice some of the virtues that drew them to XML in the first place. Java JMS is an API, defined only for Java, and it does not define a wire protocol that would allow applications running on different platforms or written in different languages to interoperate. SOAP and Web Services offer interoperability if the same underlying protocols are used and if the same WSI-protocol is used by all parties, but at the cost of more complexity than a MOM system. And as the basic components of enterprise messaging have been added piece by piece to the original specifications, Web Services have become complex, defined in a large number of overlapping specifications, without a coherent and simple architecture. The new Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) is an open, language independent, platform independent standard for enterprise messaging. It provides precisely the coherent and simple architecture that has been missing for sophisticated messaging applications. Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes a multi-language, multi-platform, open source implementation of AMQP. We develop the messaging component as part of the upstream Apache Qpid project. In order to meet the needs of XML messaging systems, we contributed the Apache Qpid XML Exchange, which provides XQuery-based routing for XML content and message properties. Together, AMQP, Apache Qpid, and the Qpid XML Exchange provide a solid foundation for mission critical XML messaging applications.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 20131090 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Pirotta ◽  
Kate L. Brookes ◽  
Isla M. Graham ◽  
Paul M. Thompson

Animals exposed to anthropogenic disturbance make trade-offs between perceived risk and the cost of leaving disturbed areas. Impact assessments tend to focus on overt behavioural responses leading to displacement, but trade-offs may also impact individual energy budgets through reduced foraging performance. Previous studies found no evidence for broad-scale displacement of harbour porpoises exposed to impulse noise from a 10 day two-dimensional seismic survey. Here, we used an array of passive acoustic loggers coupled with calibrated noise measurements to test whether the seismic survey influenced the activity patterns of porpoises remaining in the area. We showed that the probability of recording a buzz declined by 15% in the ensonified area and was positively related to distance from the source vessel. We also estimated received levels at the hydrophones and characterized the noise response curve. Our results demonstrate how environmental impact assessments can be developed to assess more subtle effects of noise disturbance on activity patterns and foraging efficiency.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin R. Townsend ◽  
Osama G. Attia ◽  
Phillip H. Jones ◽  
Joseph Zambreno

On-chip multiport memory cores are crucial primitives for many modern high-performance reconfigurable architectures and multicore systems. Previous approaches for scaling memory cores come at the cost of operating frequency, communication overhead, and logic resources without increasing the storage capacity of the memory. In this paper, we present two approaches for designing multiport memory cores that are suitable for reconfigurable accelerators with substantial on-chip memory or complex communication. Our design approaches tackle these challenges by banking RAM blocks and utilizing interconnect networks which allows scaling without sacrificing logic resources. With banking, memory congestion is unavoidable and we evaluate our multiport memory cores under different memory access patterns to gain insights about different design trade-offs. We demonstrate our implementation with up to 256 memory ports using a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. Our experimental results report high throughput memories with resource usage that scales with the number of ports.


Author(s):  
Kersten Schuster ◽  
Philip Trettner ◽  
Leif Kobbelt

We present a numerical optimization method to find highly efficient (sparse) approximations for convolutional image filters. Using a modified parallel tempering approach, we solve a constrained optimization that maximizes approximation quality while strictly staying within a user-prescribed performance budget. The results are multi-pass filters where each pass computes a weighted sum of bilinearly interpolated sparse image samples, exploiting hardware acceleration on the GPU. We systematically decompose the target filter into a series of sparse convolutions, trying to find good trade-offs between approximation quality and performance. Since our sparse filters are linear and translation-invariant, they do not exhibit the aliasing and temporal coherence issues that often appear in filters working on image pyramids. We show several applications, ranging from simple Gaussian or box blurs to the emulation of sophisticated Bokeh effects with user-provided masks. Our filters achieve high performance as well as high quality, often providing significant speed-up at acceptable quality even for separable filters. The optimized filters can be baked into shaders and used as a drop-in replacement for filtering tasks in image processing or rendering pipelines.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence V. Stanislawski ◽  
Kornelijus Survila ◽  
Jeffrey Wendel ◽  
Yan Liu ◽  
Barbara P. Buttenfield

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156
Author(s):  
Jean-François Biasse ◽  
Benjamin Pring

AbstractIn this paper we provide a framework for applying classical search and preprocessing to quantum oracles for use with Grover’s quantum search algorithm in order to lower the quantum circuit-complexity of Grover’s algorithm for single-target search problems. This has the effect (for certain problems) of reducing a portion of the polynomial overhead contributed by the implementation cost of quantum oracles and can be used to provide either strict improvements or advantageous trade-offs in circuit-complexity. Our results indicate that it is possible for quantum oracles for certain single-target preimage search problems to reduce the quantum circuit-size from $O\left(2^{n/2}\cdot mC\right)$ (where C originates from the cost of implementing the quantum oracle) to $O(2^{n/2} \cdot m\sqrt{C})$ without the use of quantum ram, whilst also slightly reducing the number of required qubits.This framework captures a previous optimisation of Grover’s algorithm using preprocessing [21] applied to cryptanalysis, providing new asymptotic analysis. We additionally provide insights and asymptotic improvements on recent cryptanalysis [16] of SIKE [14] via Grover’s algorithm, demonstrating that the speedup applies to this attack and impacting upon quantum security estimates [16] incorporated into the SIKE specification [14].


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve W. Y. Mung ◽  
Cheuk Yin Cheung ◽  
Ka Ming Wu ◽  
Joseph S. M. Yuen

This article presents a simple wideband rectangular antenna in foldable and non-foldable (printed circuit board (PCB)) structures for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Both are simple structures with two similar rectangular metal planes which cover multiple frequency bands such as GPS, WCDMA/LTE, and 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands. This wideband antenna is suitable to integrate into the short- and long-range wireless applications such as the short-range 2.4 GHz ISM band and standard cellular bands. This lowers the overall size of the product as well as the cost in the applications. In this article, the configuration and operation principle are presented as well as its trade-offs on the design parameters. Simulated and experimental results of foldable and non-foldable (PCB) structures show that the antenna is suited for IoT applications.


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