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Old 12-12-2019, 12:11 PM   #1
emanresu
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Default Crazy idea. Perhaps tried already.. who knows.

Hey.

Just got the idea thinking how those Google phone cameras work. In one shot, the camera takes several pictures and then does some comparing magic. Some averaging maybe.. And produces the final picture that is way sharper than the camera would be able to capture with single raw take.

Now, if we'd take maybe 3 identical mics, put them very close together. Record it all through same preamps and converters. Then try and get rid of the random "noise" with some clever calculations instead using eq and whatnot. I imagined it could reduce the noise floor at least.

Has anyone ever done it? If not, would some people here with godlike scripting-skills like to try this?

Just curious.
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Old 12-12-2019, 12:25 PM   #2
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Hey.

Just got the idea thinking how those Google phone cameras work. In one shot, the camera takes several pictures and then does some comparing magic. Some averaging maybe.. And produces the final picture that is way sharper than the camera would be able to capture with single raw take.

Now, if we'd take maybe 3 identical mics, put them very close together. Record it all through same preamps and converters. Then try and get rid of the random "noise" with some clever calculations instead using eq and whatnot. I imagined it could reduce the noise floor at least.

Has anyone ever done it? If not, would some people here with godlike scripting-skills like to try this?

Just curious.
Isn't most of the noise they pick up going to be the same aside from tiny phase differences caused by them being half an inch apart? Ambient noise is sound in the room, and it's not going to change match in that small of a space.
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Old 12-12-2019, 12:54 PM   #3
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Isn't most of the noise they pick up going to be the same aside from tiny phase differences caused by them being half an inch apart? Ambient noise is sound in the room, and it's not going to change match in that small of a space.
I feel like bluffing here just typing some more now
But what if the mics could be isolated with a small cone - like a dog's collar. Made of dynamat material or something like that. Then they all get most of the room reflections from different angles, meaning different phase to all of them. Except what comes directly from the source.

Still, that could be just a side effect. I'd be more curious what would happen to the direct sound.
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Old 12-12-2019, 02:16 PM   #4
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Are we talking about the "noise floor" of the room? ie the "ambient" sound of the room. It's a fairly standard technique to use a recording of this "noise" to "subtract" this noise from the recorded sound (eg by using e.g. Reafir). The thing is if you have to do this there is something wrong with your recording space - this is more a recovery operation. It can help but even today there are always artifacts with this sort of technique (at least in my limited experience). And again maybe the ambient noise is part of the atmosphere and you should be capturing it (eg for a live feel.)

OTOH this has made me think a bit and the parallel for me (as a photographer) is not so much Google as Focus Stacking. Not sure what its audio analogue would be but maybe something experimental could be interesting. I am rambling now....
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Old 12-12-2019, 02:30 PM   #5
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You can sort of 'focus' on a sound by isolating the mid signal from a stereo spaced XY mic source. If some noise happens in the room it is likely not going to be where the speaker is, thus it will be off axis in the stereo image so when you mute the side channel you will be removing much of it. But it's far from a drastic separation. You'll still hear it it just won't have the same presence that a single mono mic will capture. It also makes it harder to record because your sound source need only move a few inches and will drop in volume or change timbre considerably.

What I think has a much better chance is some sort of speech recognition isolating the human voice from its surroundings and rejecting anomalous frequency transients within vowel sounds for example.
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Old 12-16-2019, 11:30 AM   #6
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Isn't most of the noise they pick up going to be the same aside from tiny phase differences caused by them being half an inch apart? Ambient noise is sound in the room, and it's not going to change match in that small of a space.
My guess would be the camera system (if it's in fact taking multiple images and trying to stack them) is aiming (haha) to reduce operator error where you moved and blurred one of the images. Since holding the camera steady and framing a shot are as important (or more so) as the technology.

The issues with the audio recording are going to be mic position and background noise related. The motion or framing anomaly will be isolated to one of the multiple images and thus easy to spot and correct but the audio anomaly will be identical in all mics if they're in the same location. The logic of the premise doesn't quite line up and this is how it would play out I think.

Heh. Thought this thread was going to be about the software the FBI uses to stitch together multiple images taken from your phone camera to show the inside rooms of your house and all that at first. (Because your phone is only off if you remove the battery.)
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Old 12-16-2019, 11:55 AM   #7
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My guess would be the camera system (if it's in fact taking multiple images and trying to stack them) is aiming (haha) to reduce operator error where you moved and blurred one of the images. Since holding the camera steady and framing a shot are as important (or more so) as the technology.
FYI there is also a technique called "focus stacking" in order to increase depth of field, which is a multiple of images all taken with a slightly different focal length. I used to use this technique with macro photography years ago.

It's possible the phone is just doing this automatically.
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Old 12-16-2019, 12:04 PM   #8
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FYI there is also a technique called "focus stacking" in order to increase depth of field, which is a multiple of images all taken with a slightly different focal length. I used to use this technique with macro photography years ago.

It's possible the phone is just doing this automatically.
Oh right. I bet they are doing that with some autopilot now.
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