Reconstructing the acoustic signal of a sound source: What did the bat say?

Abstract

When attempting to model and understand bat biosonar behaviour, it would be very useful to know exactly what calls the bat emits, that is, what it really says, in the course of its exploration of the world. Calls could be recorded by miniature radio microphone, but such systems are complex and not all bats are sufficiently strong to carry one. In this paper we describe a technique for reconstructing the actual emitted signal of a bat using recordings collected by an array of remote microphones. The theory of the technique is described, experimental results with laboratory-recorded data (for which ground truth is available) are presented, and the performance of the method is discussed. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.