Robustness analysis of nearfield subband beamformers in the presence of microphone gain and phase errors

Abstract

Subband beamforming has found many applications in microphone array processing field, due to its advantages over the fullband counterpart. In this paper, the performance of nearfield subband beamformers for arbitrary arrays in the presence of microphone gain and phase errors is studied from the perspective of statistical analysis. Through the bias and variance analysis of array response, some insightful properties on the robustness of nearfield subband beamformers have been derived. It is shown that the robustness of nearfield subband beamformers is dependent on the source-to-array distance, i.e., the robustness will deteriorate when the source is close to microphone arrays. Moreover, the variation in sound speed, i.e., the temperature in homogeneous environments, has little effect on the robustness performance of subband beamformers. The theoretical results are further verified by several numerical examples on nearfield subband beamformers.