Direction of Arrival Estimation Using Distributed Circular Microphone Arrays

This paper considers a new method for estimating Direction of Arrival (DOA) of plane waves using distributed circular microphone arrays. Sound field produced by incident waves is decomposed into circular harmonics functions, and then we can obtain an expression of the circular harmonics coefficients. The expression is associated with position in the sound field. This formulation enables us to obtain a virtual uniform circular array from the distributed microphone array. Then we use Estimating Signal Parameter via Rotational techniques (ESPRIT) to estimate the source DOA based on a recursive relationship of Bessel functions. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can get higher accuracy than conventional method for distributed microphone array.