Beamformer configuration design in reverberant environments

Abstract

Many speech-related products rely on the deployment of microphone arrays and standard regular configurations are often used. In enhancing speech quality, the placement of microphones is indeed an important factor. Moreover, for indoor applications, the room acoustics further increases the difficulty. In this paper, these problems are addressed. First, we define the LCMV beamformer design problem using estimated room impulse responses with reverberation. Then, we study the performance limit on the filter length and formulate the configuration design problem. Finally, we employ a hybrid descent method with the genetic algorithm for solving the design problem. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.