Title: Design of robust broadband beamformers using worst-case performance optimization for time-domain spherical microphone arrays

Author(s): REN Weiyi; CHEN Huawei; BAO Yu;

Affiliation(s): College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics; State Key Laboratory of Acoustics, Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract: Spherical array modal beamformers are known to be sensitive to microphone mismatches. To combat the problem, robust design of spherical broadband beamformers with the time-domain implementation structure using the Worst-Case Performance Optimization (WCPO) is studied. It is shown that the conservativeness of the upper error bound on beamforming response is the primary factor to degrade the performance of the existing WCPO-based approach. Then an improved design approach for spherical broadband beamformers is presented using a stricter upper error bound on beamforming response. Theoretical analysis shows that the cost function of the proposed design is smaller and the range of feasible set of the proposed design is also larger when compared with the existing design. Moreover, a scheme on constraint specification has been proposed to reduce fluctuation of beamforming response over frequency at steering direction to alleviate signal distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed design outperforms its existing counterparts and exhibits a lower sidelobe level under the same condition of microphone mismatches.