Calibration of Microphone Arrays with Arbitrary Geometries

There is an increasing interest in extracting spatial information from acoustic sound fields, for instance for databased rendering of virtual scenes. Analyzing an acoustic sound field with respect to suitable spatial components, e.g., plane waves, can be performed by evaluating signals captured by a number of spatially distinct microphones, i.e., microphone arrays. Typically, the signal acquisition using these arrays is achieved in two stages. The first stage is to compensate spatio-temporal deviations of the microphones. This stage is called calibration filter in this paper. The second stage is to apply beamforming filters which are specified depending on the geometry of the array. Beamforming can be understood as extraction of plane waves from the recorded sound field. High resolution acoustic scene analysis requires a high number of microphones. In this paper we present an integrated approach for non-adaptive determination of calibration and beamforming filters for arbitrarily shaped arrays.