Physical-model based efficient data representation for many-channel microphone array

Recent development of microphone arrays which consist of more than several tens or hundreds microphones enables acquisition of rich spatial information of sound. Although such information possibly improve performance of any array signal processing technique, the amount of data will increase as the number of microphones increases; for instance, a 1024 ch MEMS microphone array, as in Fig. 1, generates data more than 10 GB per minute. In this paper, a method constructing an orthogonal basis for efficient representation of sound data obtained by the microphone array is proposed. The proposed method can obtain a basis for arrays with any configuration including rectangle, spherical, and random microphone array. It can also be utilized for designing a microphone array because it offers a quantitative measure for comparing several array configurations.