On the Design of Frequency-Invariant Beampatterns with Uniform Circular Microphone Arrays

Huang G, Benesty J, Chen J (2017)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2017

Journal

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

Book Volume: 25

Pages Range: 1140-1153

Journal Issue: 5

DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2017.2689681

Abstract

This paper deals with two critical issues about uniform circular arrays (UCAs): frequency-invariant response and steering flexibility. It focuses on some optimal design of frequency-invariant beampatterns in any desired direction along the sensor plane. The major contributions are as follows. 1) We explain how to include the steering information in the desired directivity pattern. 2) We show that the optimal approximation of the beamformer's beampattern with a UCA from a least-squares error perspective is the Jacobi-Anger expansion. 3) We develop an approach to the design of any desired symmetric directivity pattern, where the deduced beampattern is almost frequency invariant and its main beam can be pointed to any wanted direction in the sensor plane. 4) With the proposed approach, we derive an explicit form of the white noise gain (WNG) and the directivity factor (DF), and explain clearly the white noise amplification problem at low frequencies and the DF degradation at high frequencies. The analysis also indicates that increasing the number of microphones can always improve the WNG. We show that the proposed method is a generalization of circular differential microphone arrays. The relationship between the proposed method and the so-called circular harmonics beamformers is also discussed.

Authors with CRIS profile

Gongping Huang

Involved external institutions

Université Laval (UL) CA Canada (CA) Northwestern Polytechnical University / 西北工业大学 (NPU/NWPU) CN China (CN)

How to cite

APA:

Huang, G., Benesty, J., & Chen, J. (2017). On the Design of Frequency-Invariant Beampatterns with Uniform Circular Microphone Arrays. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 25(5), 1140-1153. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2017.2689681

MLA:

Huang, Gongping, Jacob Benesty, and Jingdong Chen. "On the Design of Frequency-Invariant Beampatterns with Uniform Circular Microphone Arrays." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 25.5 (2017): 1140-1153.

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