Microphone Arrays for Immersive Voice Communications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Immersive voice communication facilitates group collaborations and teleconferencing efficiently at lowcosts. It is becoming an integral part of modern communication networks. A key technical challengefor an immersive voice communication system is the ability to acquire high-fidelity acoustic, audio, andspeech signals while keeping spatial information of the sources intact so that it is possible for the remote listenerto sense the acoustic environment, follow a panel of talkers, and distinguish them by listening to thereproduction of the signals. To acquire high-fidelity speech and preserve the sound realism, it is necessaryto use microphone arrays. Although microphone array processing has been studied for a few decades,existing techniques produce frequency-dependent responses, which may cause much distortion to the signalof interest, noise, interferences, and sound realism; as a result, they are not sufficient forimmersive communication systems. This proposal is therefore organized to address the technical issues ofmicrophone array design and beamforming and develop theory, methods, and technologies that can allowacquisition, processing, and reproduction of high-fidelity spatial sound for immersive voice communicationsystems. This proposal contains the following key technical innovations and merits.1) A fundamental formulation of and a signal processing theory for frequency-invariant microphonearray design and beamforming for signals with frequency range from 60 Hz to 20 kHz.2) A new generation of technologies for linear microphone array design and frequency-invariant androbust beamforming.3) A new generation of circular and spherical microphone array design and frequency-invariant androbust beamforming algorithms.4) A signal processing theory for optimization of microphone array geometry with some given performancecriteria.5) A signal processing theory and a new generation of technologies for distributed microphone arrayprocessing.6) A practical system that takes ubiquitous acoustic signals as input and produces high-fidelity outputsignals with source realism and identifiable source identities.It is clear that the proposed research is in the heart of immersive voice communication. The resultingtechnologies can have a broad range of applications besides immersive voice communication includingtelecollaboration, human-machine interfaces, acoustic surveillance, security, smartphones, smart homesystems, tablet PCs, hearing aids, etc. As the demand of microphone arrays is increasing, the researchresult of this project will have undoubtedly a profound impact on the society and it will be truly indispensable.