Near-field adaptive beamforming and source localization in the spacetime frequency domain

We revisit the topics of near-field adaptive beamforming and source localization following an alternative approach based on a spatio-temporal spectral representation of the acoustic wave field. With the proposed method, the wave field is expressed as a separable combination of the signal and spatial components that characterize the various sources in the acoustic scene. This allows beamforming operations such as beam steering and sidelobe canceling to be translated into a two-dimensional (2D) sampling problem, where the sampling kernels are derived according to a parametric model representing the 2D spectral pattern generated in the presence of a source. Conversely, the spectral pattern can be estimated from an arbitrary input through the use of parametric spectral estimation techniques, providing a novel solution to the near-field source localization problem.