Recently, we proposed a completely novel and efficient way to design differential beamforming algorithms for linear microphone arrays. Thanks to this very flexible approach, any order of differential arrays can be designed. Moreover, they can be made robust against white noise amplification, which is the main inconvenience in these types of arrays. The other well-known problem with linear arrays is that electronic steering is not really feasible. In this book, we extend all these fundamental ideas to circular microphone arrays and show that we can design small and compact differential arrays of any order that can be electronically steered in many different directions and offer a good degree of control of the white noise amplification problem, high directional gain, and frequency-independent response. We also present a number of practical examples, demonstrating that differential beamforming with circular microphone arrays is likely one of the best candidates for applications involving speech enhancement (i.e., noise reduction and dereverberation). Nearly all of the material presented is new and will be of great interest to engineers, students, and researchers working with microphone arrays and their applications in all types of telecommunications, security and surveillance contexts.

158 2. Wiener Filtering 159 3. Speech Enhancement by Short-Time Spectral Modification 3. 1 Short-Time Fourier Analysis and Synthesis 159 160 3. 2 Short-Time Wiener Filter 161 3. 3 Power Subtraction 3. 4 Magnitude Subtraction 162 3. 5 Parametric Wiener Filtering 163 164 3. 6 Review and Discussion Averaging Techniques for Envelope Estimation 169 4. 169 4. 1 Moving Average 170 4. 2 Single-Pole Recursion 170 4. 3 Two-Sided Single-Pole Recursion 4. 4 Nonlinear Data Processing 171 5. Example Implementation 172 5. 1 Subband Filter Bank Architecture 172 173 5. 2 A-Posteriori-SNR Voice Activity Detector 5. 3 Example 175 6. Conclusion 175 Part IV Microphone Arrays 10 Superdirectional Microphone Arrays 181 Gary W. Elko 1. Introduction 181 2. Differential Microphone Arrays 182 3. Array Directional Gain 192 4. Optimal Arrays for Spherically Isotropic Fields 193 4. 1 Maximum Gain for Omnidirectional Microphones 193 4. 2 Maximum Directivity Index for Differential Microphones 195 4. 3 Maximimum Front-to-Back Ratio 197 4. 4 Minimum Peak Directional Response 200 4. 5 Beamwidth 201 5. Design Examples 201 5. 1 First-Order Designs 202 5. 2 Second-Order Designs 207 5. 3 Third-Order Designs 216 5. 4 Higher-Order designs 221 6. Optimal Arrays for Cylindrically Isotropic Fields 222 6. 1 Maximum Gain for Omnidirectional Microphones 222 6. 2 Optimal Weights for Maximum Directional Gain 224 6. 3 Solution for Optimal Weights for Maximum Front-to-Back Ratio for Cylindrical Noise 225 7. Sensitivity to Microphone Mismatch and Noise 230 8.

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 book studies the link between differential beamforming and differential equations which in turn enables the study of fundamental theory and methods of beamforming from a different perspective, leading to new insights into the problem and new methods to solve the problem. The book first presents a brief overview of the problems and methods for beamforming and some performance measures popularly used either to evaluate beamformers or to derive optimal beamformers. Then, first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations are discussed, based on which the authors show how to formulate the beamforming problem and derive different beamforming methods, including fixed and adaptive ones. Furthermore, the authors show how to apply the theory of difference equations to the general problem of speech enhancement, and deduce a number of noise reduction filters, including the maximum SNR filter, the Wiener filter, the MVDR filter, etc. Also covered in the book are the difference equations and differential beamforming from the spectral graph perspective. Presents basic concepts, fundamental principles, and methods for beamforming from the perspective of linear difference equations; Provides formulation and methods of conventional beamforming, and first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations for beamforming; Includes the applications of linear difference equations to the problem of noise reduction; Explains beamforming based on difference equations with graphs.

This book explains the motivation for using microphone arrays as opposed to using a single sensor for sound acquisition. The book then goes on to summarize the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and new algorithms therein. The material presented in this work includes analysis of the advantages of using microphone arrays, including dimensionality reduction to remove the redundancy while preserving the variability of the array signals using the principal component analysis (PCA). The authors also discuss benefits such as beamforming with low-rank approximations, fixed, adaptive, and robust distortionless beamforming, differential beamforming, and a new form of binaural beamforming that takes advantage of both beamforming and human binaural hearing properties to improve speech intelligibility. The book makes the microphone array signal processing theory and applications available in a complete and self-contained text. The authors attempt to explain the main ideas in a clear and rigorous way so that the reader can easily capture the potentials, opportunities, challenges, and limitations of microphone array signal processing. This book is written for those who work on the topics of microphone arrays, noise reduction, speech enhancement, speech communication, and human-machine speech interfaces.

Presents a unified framework of far-field and near-field array techniques for noise source identification and sound field visualization, from theory to application. Acoustic Array Systems: Theory, Implementation, and Application provides an overview of microphone array technology with applications in noise source identification and sound field visualization. In the comprehensive treatment of microphone arrays, the topics covered include an introduction to the theory, far-field and near-field array signal processing algorithms, practical implementations, and common applications: vehicles, computing and communications equipment, compressors, fans, and household appliances, and hands-free speech. The author concludes with other emerging techniques and innovative algorithms. Encompasses theoretical background, implementation considerations and application know-how Shows how to tackle broader problems in signal processing, control, and transudcers Covers both farfield and nearfield techniques in a balanced way Introduces innovative algorithms including equivalent source imaging (NESI) and high-resolution nearfield arrays Selected code examples available for download for readers to practice on their own Presentation slides available for instructor use A valuable resource for Postgraduates and researchers in acoustics, noise control engineering, audio engineering, and signal processing.

Audio Signal Processing for Next-Generation Multimedia Communication Systems presents cutting-edge digital signal processing theory and implementation techniques for problems including speech acquisition and enhancement using microphone arrays, new adaptive filtering algorithms, multichannel acoustic echo cancellation, sound source tracking and separation, audio coding, and realistic sound stage reproduction. This book's focus is almost exclusively on the processing, transmission, and presentation of audio and acoustic signals in multimedia communications for telecollaboration where immersive acoustics will play a great role in the near future.