Linear and Circular Microphone Array for Remote Surveillance: Simulated Performance Analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the simulated performance of linear and circular microphone arrays for remote acoustic surveillance, focusing on how array geometry affects beamforming response, with plans for physical implementation.

Contribution

It provides a comparative simulation study of linear and circular microphone array geometries for beamforming in surveillance applications.

Findings

Circular array offers different beamforming characteristics than linear array.

Simulation results highlight the impact of array geometry on response quality.

Future work includes physical array construction and DSP implementation.

Abstract

Acoustic beamforming with a microphone array represents an adequate technology for remote acoustic surveillance, as the system has no mechanical parts and it has moderate size. However, in order to accomplish real implementation, several challenges need to be addressed, such as array geometry, microphone characteristics, and the digital beamforming algorithms. This paper presents a simulated analysis on the effect of the array geometry in the beamforming response. Two geometries are considered, namely, the linear and the circular geometry. The analysis is performed with computer simulations to mimic reality. The future steps comprise the construction of the physical microphone array, and the software implementation on a multichannel digital signal processing (DSP) system.