Analysis and Simulation of Frost's Beamformer

Abstract

Sensor arrays are often used for a signal separation from noises using the information about the direction of arrival. The aim of this paper is to analyze Frost's beamformer with respect to the speech preprocessing for the hearing impaired people. The frequency response of the system including the background noise attenuation are derived as functions of the direction of arrival. The derivation supposes a uniform linear array of sensors and plane waves. It is shown that the number of possible configurations can be decreased by using some symmetries. The impact of the used algorithm constraint on the frequency response and subsequently on the directional noise suppression is derived analytically.