Ad hoc microphone array beamforming using the primal-dual method of multipliers

Abstract

Abstract-In the recent years, there have been an increasing amount of researches aiming at optimal beamforming with ad hoc microphone arrays, mostly fusion-center-based schemes. However, huge computational complexities and communication overheads impede many of these algorithms from being useful in practice. In this paper, we propose a low-footprint optimization approach to reduce the convergence time and overheads for the distributed beamforming problem. We transcribe the pseudocoherence-based beamforming which is insightful for taking into account the nature of speech. We formulate the distributed minimum variance distortionless response beamformer using the primal-dual method of multipliers. Our experiments confirm the fast convergence using the proposed distributed algorithm. It is also shown how a hard limit on the number of iterations affects the performance of the array in noise and interference suppression.Index Terms-Speech enhancement, ad hoc microphone array, distributed beamforming, primal-dual method of multipliers.

Distributed Microphone Arrays, Emerging Speech and Audio Signal Processing Platforms: A Review

“…The MVDR beamformer requires knowledge of the source DOA and of the steering vector of the array when applied to compact microphone arrays; however, under certain assumptions, it is possible to modify the MVDR beamformer and apply it to the distributed scenarios. The assumptions include connection between the channels [80] and an ad hoc array with nodes of known geometry [5].…”

A Low-Cost Robust Distributed Linearly Constrained Beamformer for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks With Arbitrary Topology

“…that it obtained the performance of an equivalent centralized implementation in each frame. The beamformer proposed in [26] exploited a similar method of distributed implementation, but exploited the pseudo coherence principle of human speech to overcome the scaling communication costs found in [16].…”

“…Unfortunately, this approach suffers from scaling communication costs as the number of samples used to construct the estimated CPSDM increases. In a similar vein, in [26], a distributed beamformer based on the pseudo-coherence principle was proposed. Similar to [16], the method in [26] can operate in cyclic networks.…”

“…In a similar vein, in [26], a distributed beamformer based on the pseudo-coherence principle was proposed. Similar to [16], the method in [26] can operate in cyclic networks. Furthermore, the authors demonstrated how the algorithm could perform near optimally with only a finite number of iterations, resulting in low transmission complexity.…”

Multi-Channel Compression and Coding of Reverberant Ad-Hoc Recordings Through Spatial Autoregressive Modelling

“…The portable digital devices such as smart phones and tablets with recording capabilities are ubiquitous and are being increasingly applied as online meeting platforms between multiple parties. Such so called ad-hoc microphone arrays [1] formed by portable recording devices are an emerging approach to enhance the quality of captured acoustics using the available resources in an acoustic enclosure [2] and are integrated into interconnected virtual reality and immersive technologies [3]. As ad-hoc microphones are randomly spread out within an unknown acoustic scene, blind spatial modification and spatial filtering of the recorded signals are important steps of ad-hoc speech and audio signal processing [4,5].…”