On the robustness of the superdirective beamformer

Chen X, Benesty J, Huang G, Chen J (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: 838-849

Article Number: 9330617

DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2021.3053410

Abstract

In microphone array beamforming, a high directional gain is always desired for acoustic noise and reverberation suppression; as a result, the superdirective beamformer has been of great interest in many applications. However, this beamformer is well known to be very sensitive to array imperfections. While much effort has been made to improve its robustness, it is still a major problem. This paper is essentially devoted to the study of the robustness of the superdirective beamformer and derivation of better ways to deal with this important issue. We first prove that any distortionless fixed beamformer can be written as the sum of two orthogonal beamformers, i.e., the sum of the classical delay-and-sum (DS) beamformer and a reduced-rank beamformer. Based on this property, different kinds of robust superdirective beamformers are then developed. We also show that the robust design problem can be transformed into a quadratic eigenvalue problem (QEP), which leads to a solution that achieves the maximum possible directivity factor (DF) while meets the white noise gain (WNG) constraint over a frequency band of interest.

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:

Chen, X., Benesty, J., Huang, G., & Chen, J. (2021). On the robustness of the superdirective beamformer. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 29, 838-849. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2021.3053410

MLA:

Chen, Xi, et al. "On the robustness of the superdirective beamformer." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 29 (2021): 838-849.

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