What Is Acoustic Beamforming?
Acoustic Beamforming is a signal processing algorithm, which enhances a signal of interest while suppressing interfering and background noise sources. Audio beamforming can be applied to near-field and far-field hands-free communications systems.
An acoustic beamformer provides the option to capture the individual speech from each talker and generate separate voice streams, i.e. it enhances the signal flow from the talk of interest to specific individuals while allowing background noise (other talk, motors, movement, etc.) to take place. Microphone array acoustic beamforming can serve as a front-end to voice quality enhancement algorithms and/or as a pre-processor to speech recognition engines.
VOCAL’s acoustic beamforming software libraries supports uniform linear, uniform circular, and uniform square microphone array orientations. Custom microphone array configurations can be supported upon request. The number of microphone that can be supported by the acoustic beamformer for real-time applications ranges from 2 to 16 microphones. VOCAL’s beamforming algorithms are available with standard APIs on a variety of platforms. Our native software libraries produce highly efficient code and can be bound to a large number of programming languages. Contact us to discuss your acoustic beamforming application requirements.
Standard Features
- Scalable number of microphones
- Scalable sampling rate
- Scalable frame size
- Supports both near field and far field
- Supports uniform and custom arrays
- Fixed-angle or dynamic steering
- Multi-channel operation
- Fully adaptive system adapts to changing acoustic environment
- Native instructions for high efficiency
- Wide range of platforms support
Optional Features
- Sound Source Localization
- Full-duplex Acoustic Echo Canceller (AEC)
- Multi-mic Noise Reduction
- Dereverberation
- Blind Signal Separation (BSS)
Acoustic Beamforming Applications
- Ceiling Mounted Conference Systems
- Smart Speakers and Soundbars
- Wearable Devices
- Audio surveillance
- VoIP / Telephony-based Intercoms
- Human / machine interfaces (robotics)
- Speech based command and control
- Voice annotation
VOCAL’s solution is available for the above platforms. Please contact us for specific supported platforms.