Representation and modeling of spherical harmonics manifold for source localization

Source localization has been studied in the spatial domain using differential geometry in earlier work. However, parameters of the sensor array manifold have hitherto not been investigated for source localization in spherical harmonics domain. The objective of this work is to represent and model the manifold surface using differential geometry. The system model for source localization over a spherical harmonic manifold is first formulated. Subsequently, the manifold parameters are modeled in the spherical harmonics domain. Source localization methods using MUSIC and MVDR over the spherical harmonics manifold are developed. Experiments on source localization using a spherical microphone array indicate high resolution in noise.