Adaptive beamforming by microphone arrays

In many communication situations, sound is picked up by microphones in a room for recording or transmission to a distant receiver. This paper presents an adaptive beamforming method to extract the desired signal (i.e., the desired talker´s signal) from the signals received by microphone arrays in large rooms. The proposed method relaxes the requirement of approximate knowledge of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the talker and the microphone channel gains and delays (phases). Also the method can greatly enhance the desired signal based on a focusing transformation only for the desired talker and requires much less computations than the taped-delay-line beamformer, and provides good results even in reverberant environment. Computer simulations are given to support the proposed method