A bank of beamformers implementing a constant-amplitude panning law
Yoomi Hur, Jonathan S. Abel, Young-Cheol Park, Dae Hee Youn · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
This paper describes a technique for designing a collection of beamformers, a "beamformer bank," that approximately produces a constant-amplitude panning law. Useful in multichannel audio recording scenarios, a point source will appear with energy above a specified sidelobe level in at most two adjacent beams, and the sum of all beam signals will approximate the source signal. A design method is described in which a specified sidelobe level determines beamwidth as a function of arrival direction and frequency, leading directly to the number and placement of beams at each frequency. Simulation results are presented verifying the proposed technique's performance.