A circular microphone array with virtual microphones based on acoustics-informed neural networks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Sipei, Ma, Fei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916138228645888
author Zhao, Sipei
Ma, Fei
author_facet Zhao, Sipei
Ma, Fei
contents Acoustic beamforming aims to focus acoustic signals to a specific direction and suppress undesirable interferences from other directions. Despite its flexibility and steerability, beamforming with circular microphone arrays suffers from significant performance degradation at frequencies corresponding to zeros of the Bessel functions. To conquer this constraint, baffled or concentric circular microphone arrays have been studied; however, the former needs a bulky baffle that interferes with the original sound field whereas the latter requires more microphones that increase the complexity and cost, both of which are undesirable in practical applications. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a circular microphone array equipped with virtual microphones, which resolves the performance degradation commonly associated with circular microphone arrays without resorting to physical modifications. The sound pressures at the virtual microphones are predicted from those measured by the physical microphones based on an acoustics-informed neural network, and then the sound pressures measured by the physical microphones and those predicted at the virtual microphones are integrated to design the beamformer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only eliminates the performance degradation but also suppresses spatial aliasing at high frequencies, thereby underscoring its promising potential.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A circular microphone array with virtual microphones based on acoustics-informed neural networks
Zhao, Sipei
Ma, Fei
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Acoustic beamforming aims to focus acoustic signals to a specific direction and suppress undesirable interferences from other directions. Despite its flexibility and steerability, beamforming with circular microphone arrays suffers from significant performance degradation at frequencies corresponding to zeros of the Bessel functions. To conquer this constraint, baffled or concentric circular microphone arrays have been studied; however, the former needs a bulky baffle that interferes with the original sound field whereas the latter requires more microphones that increase the complexity and cost, both of which are undesirable in practical applications. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a circular microphone array equipped with virtual microphones, which resolves the performance degradation commonly associated with circular microphone arrays without resorting to physical modifications. The sound pressures at the virtual microphones are predicted from those measured by the physical microphones based on an acoustics-informed neural network, and then the sound pressures measured by the physical microphones and those predicted at the virtual microphones are integrated to design the beamformer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only eliminates the performance degradation but also suppresses spatial aliasing at high frequencies, thereby underscoring its promising potential.
title A circular microphone array with virtual microphones based on acoustics-informed neural networks
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15735