Research on a high-resolution spherical beamforming algorithm for sound source localization

A high-resolution and high precision spherical array beamforming method for sound sources localization based on virtual sources algorithm is proposed.By means of the spherical array beam scanning,the focused spatial spectrum of actual sound sources can be obtained and each scanning point is assumed to be the virtual sound source. The actual sources focused spectrum is the result of focused beam output by the entire virtual sources,and then high precision sound source localization can be realized by calculating the contribution of each virtual source to the sound field.Compared with the conventional methods,the performance of the proposed method under some influence factors, such as frequency,array aperture,sound field mode orders and ratio of signal to noise is analyzed.The simulation results show that this method is not limited by frequency and aperture of array,effectively reducing the spatial aliasing.The focused spatial spectrum indicates the higher resolution sound sources location and the stronger ability to suppress the fluctuation of the background noise.