MP3 compression and transmission of infrasonic sensor array signals and task-specific metrics for distortion evaluation

Infrasonic sensor arrays are very useful for detecting natural and man-made events. This thesis describes part of an ongoing project for compressing and transmitting a set of infrasonic signals that need to be sent elsewhere through a low speed connection. The thesis also deals with the evaluation of the effect of the compression distortion on the signals by the use of application specific distortion metrics. We evaluate the effectiveness of the scheme using one hour worth of signals that were collected during a Space Shuttle launch using a small array of 4 microphones.; The approach described here is to combine the 4 microphone signals/channels using a transmultiplexer and to use an off-the-shelf audio compression standard, namely the popular MP3 method which is based on subband coding with uniform passbands [20]. The CODEC used in this thesis is the readily available LAME software package. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...