Title
Steering Study of Linear Differential Microphone Arrays
Abstract
AbstractDifferential microphone arrays (DMAs) can achieve high directivity and frequency-invariant spatial response with small apertures; they also have a great potential to be used in a wide spectrum of applications for high-fidelity sound acquisition. Although many efforts have been made to address the design of linear DMAs (LDMAs), most developed methods so far only work for the situation where the source of interest is incident from the endfire direction. This paper studies the steering problem of differential beamformers with linear microphone arrays. We present new insights into beam steering of LDMAs and propose a series of steerable differential beamformers. The major contributions of this paper are as follows. 1) A series of ideal functions are defined to describe the ideal, target beampatterns of LDMAs. 2) We prove that first-order differential beamformers with linear microphone arrays are not steerable and their mainlobes can only be at the endfire directions. 3) We deduce the fundamental conditions for designing steerable differential beamformers with LDMAs. 4) We develop a method to design steerable beamformers with LDMAs using null constraints. Simulations and experiments validate the properties of the developed method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TASLP.2020.3038566
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Microphone arrays, Array signal processing, Speech processing, Sensor arrays, Acoustics, Design methodology, White noise, Microphone arrays, uniform linear arrays, differential beamforming, frequency-invariant beamformer, beampattern, beam steering
Journal
29
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2329-9290
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
29
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gongping Huang17613.39
Gongping Huang27613.39
Xue-Han Wang3233.14
Jingdong Chen41460128.79
Jacob Benesty51386136.42
Israel Cohen6202.88