Design of broadband beamformers robust against gain and phase errors in the microphone array characteristics

Fixed broadband beamformers using small-size microphone arrays are known to be highly sensitive to errors in the microphone array characteristics. This paper describes two design procedures for designing broadband beamformers with an arbitrary spatial directivity pattern, which are robust against gain and phase errors in the microphone array characteristics. The first design procedure optimizes the mean performance of the broadband beamformer and requires knowledge of the gain and the phase probability density functions, whereas the second design procedure optimizes the worst-case performance by using a minimax criterion. Simulations with a small-size microphone array show the performance improvement that can be obtained by using a robust broadband beamformer design procedure.