Distributed Microphone Arrays, Emerging Speech and Audio Signal Processing Platforms: A Review

Abstract

Given ubiquitous digital devices with recording capability, distributed microphone arrays are emerging recording tools for hands-free communications and spontaneous tele-conferencings. However, the analysis of signals recorded with diverse sampling rates, time delays, and qualities by distributed microphone arrays is not straightforward and entails important considerations. The crucial challenges include the unknown/changeable geometry of distributed arrays, asynchronous recording, sampling rate mismatch, and gain inconsistency. Researchers have recently proposed solutions to these problems for applications such as source localization and dereverberation, though there is less literature on real-time practical issues. This article reviews recent research on distributed signal processing techniques and applications. New applications benefitting from the wide coverage of distributed microphones are reviewed and their limitations are discussed. This survey does not cover partially or fully connected wireless acoustic sensor networks.