Beamforming for directional sources: additional estimator and evaluation of performance under different acoustic scenarios.

Beamforming is done with an array of sensors to achieve a directional or spatially-specific response by using a model of the arriving wavefront. Conventionally, a plane wave or point source model is used and this can cause decreased array gain or even total breakdown of beamforming when the source is directional. To avoid this, the authors proposed in recent work an alternative beamforming method which defines a set of "sub-beamformers," each designed to respond to a different spatial mode of the source. The outputs of the individual sub-beamformers are combined in a weighted sum to give an overall output of better quality than that of a monopole beamformer. This paper extends the previous work by introducing an additional estimator for the weighted sum and by presenting simulation results to demonstrate the relative performance of the proposed method and the different estimators for a directional source in the presence of diffuse noise, reverberation, and an interfering source. Gain optimization subject to a constraint on the white-noise gain with the proposed beamforming method is also introduced. Generally, when beamforming on directional sources, the proposed method outperforms beamforming with a point source model when the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is 0 dB or higher.