On Acoustic Modeling for Broadband Beamforming
This work addresses acoustic modeling for microphone arrays, which is incremental as it improves upon existing models for specific engineering applications.
The authors tackled the limitations of free-field propagation models for broadband beamformers on rigid surfaces by developing a framework based on solving the acoustic wave equation using Finite-Element-Method (FEM) to evaluate microphone array performance, and demonstrated its effectiveness by designing and evaluating a representative beamformer under realistic conditions.
In this work, we describe limitations of the free-field propagation model for designing broadband beamformers for microphone arrays on a rigid surface. Towards this goal, we describe a general framework for quantifying the microphone array performance in a general wave-field by directly solving the acoustic wave equation. The model utilizes Finite-Element-Method (FEM) for evaluating the response of the microphone array surface to background 3D planar and spherical waves. The effectiveness of the framework is established by designing and evaluating a representative broadband beamformer under realistic acoustic conditions.