Low power implementation of Geometric High-order Decorrelation-based Source Separation on an FPGA board

Open source software for robot audition called HARK aims to make “OpenCV” in audio signal processing, providing comprehensive functions from multichannel audio input to sound localization, sound source separation, and au-tomatic speech recognition. Since each of these HARK modules takes considerable energy when executed on PC, we propose to implement each module on an FPGA board called M-KUBOS connected. Here, we focus on the most computationally expensive function of HARK; the sound source separation, and implement it on a Zynq Ultrascale+ board. More than twice a performance improvement was achieved by using the sound frequency level parallelization in the HLS description compared to the software execution on the Ryzen 3990X64-core server. Power evaluation of the real board showed that the energy consumption is only 1/23.4 of the server.