Beamforming and other methods for denoising microphone array data

Abstract

Measured acoustic data can be contaminated by noise. This typically happens when microphones are mounted in a wind tunnel wall or on the fuselage of an aircraft, where hydrodynamic pressure fluctuations of the Turbulent Boundary Layer (TBL) can mask the acoustic pressures of interest. For measurements done with an array of microphones, methods exist for denoising the acoustic data. Use is made of the fact that the noise is usually concentrated in the diagonal of the Cross-Spectral Matrix, because of the short spatial coherence of TBL noise. This paper reviews several existing denoising methods and considers the use of Conventional Beamforming, Source Power Integration and CLEAN-SC for this purpose. A comparison between the methods is made using synthesized array data.