Cell-based beamforming (CE-BABE) for speech acquisition with microphone arrays

Abstract

This paper introduces a microphone array processing method that possesses the robustness of fixed beamforming along with the ability to be dynamically reconfigured to limit interference and reverberation. The basic approach is to partition the environment into two regions: an interior region (containing sources that are physically present within the room enclosure), and an exterior region (containing virtual sources of reverberation). The interior region is further divided into cells, and standard source localization techniques are used to identify those cells containing the desired source as well as sources of interference (e.g., competing talkers). Beamforming weights are then found to pass the desired signal, while simultaneously minimizing a weighted combination of interior interference and exterior reverberation. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique when compared with conventional beamforming methods.