In the past few years we have written and edited several books in the area of acousticandspeechsignalprocessing. Thereasonbehindthisendeavoristhat there were almost no books available in the literature when we ?rst started while there was (and still is) a real need to publish manuscripts summarizing the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and state-of-the-art algorithms in this important area of research. According to all the feedback we have received so far, we can say that we were right in doing this. Recently, several other researchers have followed us in this journey and have published interesting books with their own visions and perspectives. The idea of writing a book on Microphone Array Signal Processing comes from discussions we have had with many colleagues and friends. As a c- sequence of these discussions, we came up with the conclusion that, again, there is an urgent need for a monograph that carefully explains the theory and implementation of microphone arrays. While there are many manuscripts on antenna arrays from a narrowband perspective (narrowband signals and narrowband processing), the literature is quite scarce when it comes to s- sor arrays explained from a truly broadband perspective. Many algorithms for speech applications were simply borrowed from narrowband antenna - rays. However, a direct application of narrowband ideas to broadband speech processing may not be necessarily appropriate and can lead to many m- understandings.

This is the first book to provide a single complete reference on microphone arrays. Top researchers in this field contributed articles documenting the current state of the art in microphone array research, development and technological application.

This book deals with the problem of detecting and localizing multiple simultaneously active wideband acoustic sources by applying the notion of wavefield decomposition using circular and spherical microphone arrays. A rigorous derivation of modal array signal processing algorithms for unambiguous source detection and localization, as well as performance evaluations by means of measurements using an actual real-time capable implementation, are discussed.

Modern communication devices, such as mobile phones, teleconferencing systems, VoIP, etc., are often used in noisy and reverberant environments. Therefore, signals picked up by the microphones from telecommunication devices contain not only the desired near-end speech signal, but also interferences such as the background noise, far-end echoes produced by the loudspeaker, and reverberations of the desired source. These interferences degrade the fidelity and intelligibility of the near-end speech in human-to-human telecommunications and decrease the performance of human-to-machine interfaces (i.e., automatic speech recognition systems). The proposed book deals with the fundamental challenges of speech processing in modern communication, including speech enhancement, interference suppression, acoustic echo cancellation, relative transfer function identification, source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments. Enhancement of speech signals is necessary whenever the source signal is corrupted by noise. In highly non-stationary noise environments, noise transients, and interferences may be extremely annoying. Acoustic echo cancellation is used to eliminate the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone of a communication device. Identification of the relative transfer function between sensors in response to a desired speech signal enables to derive a reference noise signal for suppressing directional or coherent noise sources. Source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments further enable to increase the intelligibility of the near-end speech signal.

The book covers the design formulations for broadband beamformer targeting nearfield and farfield sources. The book content includes background information on the acoustic environment, including propagation medium, the array geometries, signal models and basic beamformer designs. Subsequently it introduces design formulation for nearfield, farfield and mixed nearfield-farfield beamformers and extends the design formulation into electronically steerable beamformers. In addition, a robust formulation is introduced for all the designs mentioned.

The focus of this book is on array processing and beamforming with Kronecker products. It considers a large family of sensor arrays that allow the steering vector to be decomposed as a Kronecker product of two steering vectors of smaller virtual arrays. Instead of directly designing a global beamformer for the original array, once the steering vector has been decomposed, smaller virtual beamformers are designed and separately optimized for each virtual array. This means the matrices that need to be inverted are smaller, which increases the robustness of the beamformers, and reduces the size of the observations. The book explains how to perform beamforming with Kronecker product filters using an unconventional approach. It shows how the Kronecker product formulation can be used to derive fixed, adaptive, and differential beamformers with remarkable flexibility. Furthermore, it demonstrates how fixed and adaptive beamformers can be intelligently combined, optimally exploiting the advantages of both. The problem of spatiotemporal signal enhancement is also addressed, and readers will learn how to perform Kronecker product filtering in this context.

This open access book relates to the III Annual Conference hosted by The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation in December 2016. This event has summarized, analyzed and discussed the interim results, academic outputs and scientific achievements of the Russian Federal Targeted Programme “Research and Development in Priority Areas of Development of the Russian Scientific and Technological Complex for 2014–2020.” It contains 75 selected papers from 6 areas considered priority by the Federal Targeted Programme: computer science, ecology & environment sciences; energy and energy efficiency; lifesciences; nanoscience & nanotechnology and transport & communications. The chapters report the results of the 3-years research projects supported by the Programme and finalized in 2016.