Ad hoc microphone array beamforming using the primal-dual method of multipliers

Abstract

In the recent years, there have been an increasing amount of researches aiming at optimal beamforming with ad hoc microphone arrays, mostly fusion-center-based schemes. However, huge computational complexities and communication overheads impede many of these algorithms from being useful in practice. In this paper, we propose a low-footprint optimization approach to reduce the convergence time and overheads for the distributed beamforming problem. We transcribe the pseudo-coherence-based beamforming which is insightful for taking into account the nature of speech. We formulate the distributed minimum variance distortionless response beamformer using the primal-dual method of multipliers. Our experiments confirm the fast convergence using the proposed distributed algorithm. It is also shown how a hard limit on the number of iterations affects the performance of the array in noise and interference suppression.