Near-field beamforming for microphone arrays

This paper describes the application of array optimization techniques to improving the near-field response of an arbitrary microphone array. The optimization exploits the differences in wavefront curvature between near-field and far-field sound sources and is suitable for reverberation reduction in small rooms. The optimum near-field beamformer provides increased array gain over that obtained from a uniformly weighted delay-and-sum beamformer.