Title
On Differential Beamforming With Nonuniform Linear Microphone Arrays
Abstract
While differential beamforming with uniform linear arrays (ULAs) has been widely studied, there is little work so far regarding the design of differential beamformers with nonuniform linear arrays (NULAs). This article attempts to shed some light on the principles of differential beamforming with NULAs. We define spatial difference operators with NULAs, where any order of the spatial difference of the observation signals can be represented as the product of a nonuniform spatial difference operator matrix and the observation vector. Consequently, the design of differential beamformers is performed in two stages. In the first one, a nonuniform spatial difference operator matrix is applied to the array observations, thereby yielding differential signals. In the second stage, beamformers are designed and applied to the obtained differential signals to optimize the array performance. Based on the defined spatial difference operators, we derive from some performance metrics a family of differential beamformers with NULAs, which include the maximum directivity factor (DF), the maximum white noise gain (WNG), and the maximum front-to-back ratio (FBR) differential beamformers. To compromise between the DF and array robustness, we also derive the parameterized maximum DF and parameterized maximum FBR differential beamformers. The null-constraint maximum DF and WNG differential beamformers are also developed so that some nulls can be placed in specified directions for interference suppression. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and justify the properties of the proposed methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TASLP.2022.3178229
IEEE-ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Array signal processing, White noise, Speech processing, Sensors, Microphone arrays, Signal to noise ratio, Jacobian matrices, Differential beamforming, directivity factor, front-to-back ratio, nonuniform linear arrays, spatial difference operator, white noise gain
Journal
30
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2329-9290
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
18
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gongping Huang17613.39
Gongping Huang27613.39
Jacob Benesty31386136.42
Jingdong Chen41460128.79