Fundamentals of Microphone Array Processing

After a brief but insightful discussion on the limitations of single microphone processing and the unquestionable advantages of spatial information, in this chapter, we make a concise overview of the most fundamental concepts in microphone array processing. We start with the signal model by considering the general case of three-dimensional arrays. In this context, we explain how to conduct linear beamforming, from which very useful performance measures are derived. Then, a large family of fixed and adaptive beamformers are proposed as well as some signal statistics estimators. Finally, we explain how different array geometries can be compared.