Apart from sound acquisition enhancement from selected sound source directions in an acoustic space, a further advantage of microphone array systems in general is the ability to locate and track prominent sound sources in the acoustic space. Two common techniques of sound source location are known as the time difference of arrival (TDOA) method and the steered response power (SRP) method, which can be used either alone or in combination.
As mentioned above, microphone array beamforming techniques are commonly used to reduce the amount of reverberation captured by the transducers. Excessive reverberation negatively affects the intelligibility and quality of captured audio as perceived by human listeners, as well as the performance of automatic speech recognition and speech biometric systems. Reverberation is reduced by microphone array beamformers by reducing the contribution of sounds received from directions other than the target direction (i.e., where the “beam” is directed).