High-resolution CLEAN-SC for acoustic source identification with spherical microphone arrays

Abstract

Spherical harmonics beamforming (SHB) with solid spherical microphone arrays can identify acoustic source in all directions simultaneously. To surpass the Rayleigh resolution limit and improve the performance of acoustic sources identification, this paper applies the high-resolution CLEAN-SC (HR-CLEAN-SC) algorithm, introduced by Sijtsma et al. for beamforming with planar arrays, to SHB. The factor of the potential resolution enhancement is typically about 1.7 compared to the Rayleigh resolution limit. Furthermore, simulations and experiments with spherical arrays demonstrate that HR-CLEAN-SC has higher spatial resolution and accuracy of both location and quantification than standard CLEAN-SC.