Title
On the Design of Target Beampatterns for Differential Microphone Arrays
Abstract
Differential microphone arrays DMAs have many interesting properties and have been widely used in acoustic, audio, and speech applications. A critical part of a DMA is the differential beamformer, which is generally designed in two important steps: 1 specifying a target beampattern based on what differential sound pressure field the DMA is expected to respond to and 2 designing the differential beamforming filter so that the resulting beampattern matches the target one. Most efforts in the study of DMAs so far have focused on the second step while choosing one of the limited patterns available in the literature as the target beampattern. Since it governs how the array performs, how to design the target beampattern is an important problem, which this paper addresses. The major contributions of this paper consists of the following four aspects. First, a positive superposition theorem is presented, which shows that the linear combination of effective beampatterns with non-negative coefficients is always an effective beampattern. Second, we propose a general approach to the design of target DMA beampatterns based on the positive superposition theorem. Third, an overview of the classical target beampatterns is provided and discussion is made on how to form effective base patterns. Fourth, we show that the smallest first null of a DMA is $\pi /2N$ with $N$ being the DMA order, which provides the rule of setting nulls in practice. Finally, with examples, we show that with the use of the alternating-direction-method-of-multipliers algorithm, the proposed approach is able to generate useful DMA target beampatterns.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/taslp.2019.2918081
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Array signal processing,Speech processing,Microphone arrays,Pressure measurement,Acoustics,Roads
Superposition theorem,Linear combination,Beamforming,Speech processing,Sound pressure,Computer science,Speech applications,Algorithm,Speech recognition,Microphone
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
8
2329-9290
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
8
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chao Pan1343.60
Jingdong Chen21460128.79
Jacob Benesty3325.57
Guangming Shi42663184.81