Insights into frequency-invariant beamforming with concentric circular microphone arrays

Huang G, Chen J, Benesty J (2018)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2018

Journal

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

Book Volume: 26

Pages Range: 2305-2318

Article Number: 8424434

Journal Issue: 12

DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2018.2862826

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of frequency-invariant beamforming with concentric circular microphone arrays (CCMAs) and presents an approach to the design of frequency-invariant and symmetric beampatterns. We first apply the Jacobi-Anger expansion to each ring of the CCMA to approximate the beampattern. The beamformer is then designed by using all the expansions from different rings. In comparison with the existing work in the literature where a Jacobi-Anger expansion of the same order is applied to different rings, here in this contribution the order of the Jacobi-Anger expansion at a ring is related to its number of sensors and, as a result, the expansion order at different rings may be different. The developed approach is rather general. It is not only able to mitigate the deep nulls problem in the directivity factor and the white noise gain, that is common to circular microphone arrays (CMAs), and improve the steering flexibility, but is also flexible to use in practice where a smaller ring can have less microphones than a larger one. We discuss the conditions for the design of $N$th-order symmetric beampatterns and examples of frequency-invariant beampatterns with commonly used array geometries such as CMAs, CMAs with a sensor at the center, and CCMAs. We show the advantage of adding one microphone at the center of either a CMA or a CCMA, i.e., circumventing the deep nulls problem caused by the 0th-order Bessel function.

Authors with CRIS profile

Gongping Huang

Involved external institutions

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

How to cite

APA:

Huang, G., Chen, J., & Benesty, J. (2018). Insights into frequency-invariant beamforming with concentric circular microphone arrays. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 26(12), 2305-2318. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2018.2862826

MLA:

Huang, Gongping, Jingdong Chen, and Jacob Benesty. "Insights into frequency-invariant beamforming with concentric circular microphone arrays." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 26.12 (2018): 2305-2318.

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