An Odor Communication System

The most general building blocks of such an odor communication system are as depicted in Figure 1. At a remote location (Figure 1a) an input device the sniffer is used to take in the odor and transform it into a digital fingerprint. At a different location (Figure 1b), the fingerprint will be analyzed by the mix-to-mimic (MTM) algorithm, which will instruct an output device. The whiffer to emit a mixture of odorants that will mimic the input odor well enough to fool a human into thinking that he/she actually smells it. Prior to all of this there is also a considerable amount of preprocessing and preparation. All of this will be discussed later on.

This setup is in direct analogy with other communication systems. For example, if we replace the sniffer by a camera, and the whiffer by a printer, we get a visual communication system, with the various color coding (RGB, CMYK, etc.) being analogous to our mixing technique.