Microphone Arrays

This book explains the motivation for using microphone arrays as opposed to using a single sensor for sound acquisition. The book then goes on to summarize the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and new algorithms therein. The material presented in this work includes analysis of the advantages of using microphone arrays, including dimensionality reduction to remove the redundancy while preserving the variability of the array signals using the principal component analysis (PCA). The authors also discuss benefits such as beamforming with low-rank approximations, fixed, adaptive, and robust distortionless beamforming, differential beamforming, and a new form of binaural beamforming that takes advantage of both beamforming and human binaural hearing properties to improve speech intelligibility. The book makes the microphone array signal processing theory and applications available in a complete and self-contained text. The authors attempt to explain the main ideas in a clear and rigorous way so that the reader can easily capture the potentials, opportunities, challenges, and limitations of microphone array signal processing. This book is written for those who work on the topics of microphone arrays, noise reduction, speech enhancement, speech communication, and human-machine speech interfaces.

Jacob Benesty received a master’s degree in microwaves from Pierre & Marie Curie University, France, in 1987, and a Ph.D. degree in control and signal processing from Paris-Saclay University, France, in April 1991. During his Ph.D. (from Nov. 1989 to Apr. 1991), he worked on adaptive filters and fast algorithms at the Centre National d'Etudes des Telecommunications (CNET), Paris, France. From January 1994 to July 1995, he worked at Telecom Paris University on multichannel adaptive filters and acoustic echo cancellation. From October 1995 to May 2003, he was first a consultant and then a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. In May 2003, he joined the University of Quebec, INRS-EMT, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, as a professor. He is also an adjunct professor with Aalborg University, Denmark, and a guest professor with Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China. His research interests are in signal processing, acoustic signal processing, and multimedia communications. He is the inventor of many important technologies. In particular, he was the lead researcher at Bell Labs who conceived and designed the world-first real-time hands-free full-duplex stereophonic teleconferencing system. Also, he conceived and designed the world-first PC-based multi-party hands-free full-duplex stereo conferencing system over IP networks. He is the editor of the book series Springer Topics in Signal Processing. He was the general chair and technical chair of many international conferences and a member of several IEEE technical committees. Four of his journal papers were awarded by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, in 2010 he received the Gheorghe Cartianu Award from the Romanian Academy, and in 2023 he received an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Technices Honoris Causa) from Aalborg University, Denmark, for his distinguished efforts in audio and acoustic signal processing. He has co-authored and co-edited/co-authored numerous books in the area of acoustic signal processing.

Gongping Huang received his bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Information Engineering and his Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xian, China, in 2012 and 2019, respectively. Between 2015 and 2017, he worked as a visiting researcher at University of Quebec, INRS-EMT, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Following this, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, from 2019 to 2021. He was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is now a professor at Wuhan University. His research interests include microphone arrays, acoustic signal processing, and speech enhancement. Dr. Huang received the Humboldt Research Fellowship (2021), the Andrew and Erna Finci Viterbi Post-Doctoral Fellowship award (2019), the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the Chinese Institute of Electronics (2021), and the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award of Shanxi Province (2021). He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the Circuits Systems and Signal Processing Journal and a Consulting Associate Editors for the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing. He also serves as an active reviewer for more than 30 scientific journals and international conferences.

Jingdong Chen received the Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and intelligence control from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998. From 1998 to 1999, he was with ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan, where he conducted research on speech synthesis, speech analysis, as well as objective measurements for evaluating speech synthesis. He then joined the Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, where he engaged in research on robust speech recognition and signal processing. From 2000 to 2001, he worked at ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories on robust speech recognition and speech enhancement. From 2001 to 2009, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, working on acoustic signal processing for telecommunications. He subsequently joined WeVoice Inc. in New Jersey, serving as the Chief Scientist. He is currently a professor at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China. His research interests include array signal processing, adaptive signal processing, speech enhancement, adaptive noise/echo control, signal separation, speech communication, and artificial intelligence. Dr. Chen has coauthored 12 monograph books. He received the 2008 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (with Benesty, Huang, and Doclo), the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in 2011 (with Benesty), the Bell Labs Role Model Teamwork Award twice, respectively, in 2009 and 2007, the NASA Tech Brief Award twice, respectively, in 2010 and 2009, and the Young Author Best Paper Award from the 5th National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communications in 1998. He is a co-author of a paper for which C. Pan received the IEEE R10 (Asia-Pacific Region) Distinguished Student Paper Award (First Prize) in 2016. He was also a recipient of the Japan Trust International Research Grant from the Japan Key Technology Center in 1998 and the “Distinguished Young Scientists Fund” from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2014.

Ningning Pan received a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Information Engineering in 2014 and a Master’s degree in Signal and Information Processing in 2017 all from the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU). She is expected to receive a Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication also from NPU in 2023. Between 2018 and 2020, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University. She will be soon joining the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics as an associate professor. Her research interests include speech enhancement, artificial intelligence, binaural hearing, and acoustic signal processing.