Controlling Elevation and Azimuth Beamwidths With Concentric Circular Microphone Arrays

Solutions for frequency-invariant or constant-beamwidth beamforming with concentric circular arrays (CCAs) generally control only the azimuth-beampattern. This work introduces a beamforming methodology, which instead of designing a fixed beamwidth across the spectrum, maximizes the directivity-factor under the constraint that the beamwidth is greater than or equal to a pre-defined target-beamwidth, in both the elevation and the azimuth. The principal idea lies in dynamically weighting the microphones of the CCA based on two factors - (i) their corresponding ring number or radius, and (ii) their alignment with the signal-path. The parameters controlling the weights are determined using a modified gradient-descent algorithm. Experimental results show the flexibility and advantage of the proposed methodology over state-of-the-art methods.