Steering study of linear differential microphone arrays

Jin J, Huang G, Wang X, Chen J, Benesty J, Cohen I (2021)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2021

Journal

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Book Volume: 29

Pages Range: 158-170

Article Number: 9261932

DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2020.3038566

Abstract

Differential 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.

Authors with CRIS profile

Gongping Huang

Involved external institutions

Northwestern Polytechnical University / 西北工业大学 (NPU/NWPU) CN China (CN) Technion - Israel Institute of Technology IL Israel (IL) Université Laval (UL) CA Canada (CA)

How to cite

APA:

Jin, J., Huang, G., Wang, X., Chen, J., Benesty, J., & Cohen, I. (2021). Steering study of linear differential microphone arrays. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 29, 158-170. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2020.3038566

MLA:

Jin, Jilu, et al. "Steering study of linear differential microphone arrays." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 29 (2021): 158-170.

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