Control of the Beamwidth of a Beamformer with a fixed array configuration

摘要

The directional characteristic of the optimal beamformer of a transducer array depends not only on its hardware configuration but also on the stability factor. This parameter can be used to control the directivity of the array. In this paper, a method, which is based on the proper selection strategy of the stability factor, is suggested to control the directional characteristics of the optimal beamformer without changing the array configuration. The selection method of the stability factor was investigated considering the trade-off relation between spatial resolution and noise amplification or array gain. The suggested method was applied to the problems of both microphone- and loudspeaker arrays to obtain a specific directivity pattern of high resolution with a constant beamwidth.