Spatial sampling and beamforming for spherical microphone arrays

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in spatial sampling and beamforming techniques for spherical microphone arrays, highlighting their applications in sound recording, speech communication, and room acoustics analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent methods in spatial sampling and beamforming for spherical arrays, including both classical and advanced approaches.

Findings

Spatial sampling methods enable flexible array configurations.

Beamforming techniques range from delay-and-sum to optimal spherical harmonics methods.

Recent methods improve sound source localization and noise reduction.

Abstract

Spherical microphone arrays have been recently studied for spatial sound recording, speech communication, and sound field analysis for room acoustics and noise control. Complementary theoretical studies presented progress in spatial sampling and beamforming methods. This paper reviews recent results in spatial sampling that facilitate a wide range of spherical array configurations, from a single rigid sphere to free positioning of microphones. The paper then presents an overview of beamforming methods recently presented for spherical arrays, from the widely used delay-and-sum and Dolph-Chebyshev, to the more advanced optimal methods, typically performed in the spherical harmonics domain.