Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations

In broadband beamformer applications with dynamically moving sources, it can be important to have a simple mechanism to steer the main-beam. It can also be desirable if the beampattern of the beamformer is invariant to the look direction. A number of design methods for such beamformers, based on the...

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Main Authors: Lai, Chiong Ching, Nordholm, Sven, Leung, Yee-Hong
Format: Journal Article
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/33823
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author Lai, Chiong Ching
Nordholm, Sven
Leung, Yee-Hong
author_facet Lai, Chiong Ching
Nordholm, Sven
Leung, Yee-Hong
author_sort Lai, Chiong Ching
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description In broadband beamformer applications with dynamically moving sources, it can be important to have a simple mechanism to steer the main-beam. It can also be desirable if the beampattern of the beamformer is invariant to the look direction. A number of design methods for such beamformers, based on the spherical harmonic transform, have been reported in the literature. However, these methods require the sensor positions to satisfy a certain condition which may conflict with practical considerations. This paper proposes a design method which obviates this restriction thus allowing for spherical arrays with arbitrary sensor configurations. Moreover, for a comparable level of performance and computational complexity to the existing spherical harmonic beamformers, the proposed beamformer requires fewer sensors. The trade-off is that the design of the beamformer now depends on the sensor positions. Other considerations, such as the effects of array misorientation and robustness, are also discussed in this paper and illustrated by design examples.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-338232017-09-13T15:32:49Z Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations Lai, Chiong Ching Nordholm, Sven Leung, Yee-Hong steerable array orthonormality sensor configuration Broadband beamformer spherical harmonics In broadband beamformer applications with dynamically moving sources, it can be important to have a simple mechanism to steer the main-beam. It can also be desirable if the beampattern of the beamformer is invariant to the look direction. A number of design methods for such beamformers, based on the spherical harmonic transform, have been reported in the literature. However, these methods require the sensor positions to satisfy a certain condition which may conflict with practical considerations. This paper proposes a design method which obviates this restriction thus allowing for spherical arrays with arbitrary sensor configurations. Moreover, for a comparable level of performance and computational complexity to the existing spherical harmonic beamformers, the proposed beamformer requires fewer sensors. The trade-off is that the design of the beamformer now depends on the sensor positions. Other considerations, such as the effects of array misorientation and robustness, are also discussed in this paper and illustrated by design examples. 2013 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/33823 10.1109/TASL.2012.2219527 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers fulltext
spellingShingle steerable array
orthonormality
sensor configuration
Broadband beamformer
spherical harmonics
Lai, Chiong Ching
Nordholm, Sven
Leung, Yee-Hong
Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title_full Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title_fullStr Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title_full_unstemmed Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title_short Design of Steerable Spherical Broadband Beamformers with Flexible Sensor Configurations
title_sort design of steerable spherical broadband beamformers with flexible sensor configurations
topic steerable array
orthonormality
sensor configuration
Broadband beamformer
spherical harmonics
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/33823