A self-steering digital microphone array

A self-steering microphone array for teleconferencing in which the digitally implemented steering algorithm consists of two parts is presented. The first part, the beamforming, is based on known concepts. The second part, a novel voting algorithm, integrates elements of pattern classification and exploits temporal characteristics of speech signals. It accounts for perceptual criteria and the acoustic environment. A real-time implementation is outlined, and results are discussed. The results confirm that the proposed concept deals successfully with teleconferencing environments and that it yields substantially better performance than earlier concepts based on analog hardware