Sound field separation in a mixed acoustic environment using a sparse array of higher order spherical microphones

In many acoustic environments, we frequently observe that sound fields caused by desired and undesired sources superimpose each other and form a mixed sound field in the region. Hence, in acoustic signal processing applications, such as sound field recording, speech dereverberation and noise suppression, it is of a great interest to separate the desired sound field from the undesired ones. In this paper, we propose a solution to isolate the desired sound field in a mixed sound field environment for 3D sound propagation. The solution utilizes a sparse array of higher order microphones to achieve the goal, which greatly reduces the design complexity by using less number of microphones in an implementation-favorable geometry. We evaluate the performance under different noisy and noiseless environments to test the effectiveness as well as the robustness of the algorithm.