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Acoustic beamforming can efficiently enhance the speech of interest while suppressing interference, background noise, and reverberation. It allows people to move freely around without wearing or holding a microphone. Acoustic beamforming provides the option to capture the individual speech from each talker and generate separate voice streams, i.e. it enhances the signal flow from the talk of interest to specific individuals and allows background noise (other talk, motors, movement, etc.) to take place.
VOCAL's software implementation of acoustic beamforming allows for uniform linear array, uniform circular array, and uniform square array orientations. The maximum number of microphones that can be processed by the acoustic beamforming software for real-time applications would be limited by the capabilities of the processor. The software package contains a source localization algorithm to estimate the Direction of Arrival (DoA) of the desired signal and to dynamically steer the beamforming algorithm in the appropriate direction to capture this signal.
VOCAL's acoustic beamforming includes, but is not limited to, the following algorithms.
These algorithms are applicable to a wide range of the array configurations that exist in reverberation environments and can compensate for errors in the Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation of the desired signal. The selection of the algorithm is based on the requirements of the application and the available hardware configuration (e.g. the number of microphones, the capabilities of the desired processor). The diagram of the most commonly implemented acoustic beamforming, Time-Domain Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (TD-GSC), is shown in Figure 1. The quality of the speech can be enhanced by integrating any number of optional features with the beamforming scheme, based on the requirements of the application and the acoustic environments.
Standard Features
Scalable number of microphones
Scalable sampling rate
Scalable frame size
Supports both near field and far field
Supports uniform linear array, uniform circular array, and uniform square array
Fixed-angle or dynamic steering
Multi-channel operation
Fully adaptive system adapts to changing acoustic environment
Optional Features
Full-duplex Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC)
Stationary and Non-stationary noise suppression
Active noise controller
De-reverberation
Blind Signal Separation (BSS)
Applications
VoIP / Telephony
Tele-conferencing
Human / machine interface
Speech based command and control
Voice annotation
Audio notes
For more information about acoustic beamforming, check out the following links: