On the robustness of the superdirective beamformer

Xi Chen, Jacob Benesty, Gongping Huang, Jingdong Chen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9330617
Pages (from-to)838-849
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing
Volume29
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Keywords

  • Directivity factor
  • Microphone arrays
  • Quadratic eigenvalue problem
  • Robustness
  • Superdirective beamformer
  • white noise gain

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