A simulation of thinning of microphone array in near-field broadband beamformers

This paper is devoted to the problem of designing an optimal microphone matrix. We define a criterion function where the performance of our matrix should be as close as possible to the desired one based on L2 norm. In the classical approach, increasing a size of the matrix is used to improve the system performance. However, in many cases it is not a good solution. In this paper we propose a solution based on thinning technique. We work with rectangular, equispaced microphone matrix and using metaheuristic approach called simulated annealing we optimise the set of active microphones (we switch off some of the microphones from the regular matrix). For illustrations, few numerical examples are solved. Comparing to the classical approach we show that thinning microphone matrix can significantly improve system performance.