A maximum likelihood direction of arrival estimation method for open-sphere microphone arrays in the spherical harmonic domain

Abstract

Open-sphere microphone arrays are preferred over rigid-sphere arrays when minimal interaction between array and the measured sound field is required. However, open-sphere arrays suffer from poor robustness at null frequencies of the spherical Bessel function. This letter proposes a maximum likelihood method for direction of arrival estimation in the spherical harmonic domain, which avoids the division of the spherical Bessel function and can be used at arbitrary frequencies. Furthermore, the method can be easily extended to wideband implementation. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the commonly used methods in open-sphere configurations.