Source localization with minimum variance distortionless response for spherical microphone arrays

To improve localization accuracy, the spherical microphone arrays are used to capture high-order wavefield information. For the far field sound sources, the array signal model is constructed based on plane wave decomposition. The spatial spectrum function is calculated by minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) to scan the three-dimensional space. The peak values of the spectrum function correspond to the directions of multiple sound sources. A diagonal loading method is adopted to solve the ill-conditioned cross spectrum matrix of the received signals. The loading level depends on the alleviation of the ill-condition of the matrix and the accuracy of the inverse calculation. Compared with plane wave decomposition method, our proposed localization algorithm can acquire high spatial resolution and better estimation for multiple sound source directions, especially in low signal to noise ratio (SNR).