Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers With Flexible Sensor Configurations

In broadband beamformer applications with dynamically moving sources, it can be important to have a simple mechanism to steer the main-beam. It can also be desirable if the beampattern of the beamformer is invariant to the look direction. A number of design methods for such beamformers, based on the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on audio, speech, and language processing speech, and language processing, 2013-02, Vol.21 (2), p.427-438
Main Authors: Chiong Ching Lai, Nordholm, S., Yee Hong Leung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Applied sciences
Arrays
Beam steering
Broadband
Broadband beamformer
Broadband communication
Design methodology
Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction
Exact sciences and technology
Harmonic analysis
Information, signal and communications theory
Invariants
orthonormality
Power harmonic filters
Robustness
Sensor arrays
sensor configuration
Sensors
Signal and communications theory
Signal, noise
Spherical harmonics
steerable array
Studies
Surface waves
Telecommunications and information theory
Tradeoffs
Transaction processing
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Summary:In broadband beamformer applications with dynamically moving sources, it can be important to have a simple mechanism to steer the main-beam. It can also be desirable if the beampattern of the beamformer is invariant to the look direction. A number of design methods for such beamformers, based on the spherical harmonic transform, have been reported in the literature. However, these methods require the sensor positions to satisfy a certain condition which may conflict with practical considerations. This paper proposes a design method which obviates this restriction thus allowing for spherical arrays with arbitrary sensor configurations. Moreover, for a comparable level of performance and computational complexity to the existing spherical harmonic beamformers, the proposed beamformer requires fewer sensors. The trade-off is that the design of the beamformer now depends on the sensor positions. Other considerations, such as the effects of array mis-orientation and robustness, are also discussed in this paper and illustrated by design examples.
ISSN:1558-7916
2329-9290
1558-7924
2329-9304
DOI:10.1109/TASL.2012.2219527