An acoustic beamformer is an essential part of an acoustic system that has direction steering properties. The basic system consists of a multiple microphone array where microphones are located along one horizontal line with equal distance between microphones.
A block diagram of the basic Acoustic beamformer is shown at Fig. 1. There are N microphones in the system. The signal from each microphone has to be delayed by nΔt, (Δt control delay and n– index of the microphone) to steer the beam to a direction from 0 to 900 and (N–n)Δt to steer from 0 to -900. It is assumed that straight forward direction is 00.
The output of all delay blocks has to be added together. As a result the signal coming from the desired direction is amplified. The ratio of the signal from desired direction versus the signal from undesired direction or noise is increased.