Plane-wave decomposition of a sound scene using a cylindrical microphone array

The analysis for microphone arrays formed by mounting microphones on a sound-hard spherical or cylindrical baffle is typically performed using a decomposition of the sound field in terms of orthogonal basis functions. An alternative representation in terms of plane waves and a method for obtaining the coefficients of such a representation directly from measurements was proposed recently for the case of a spherical array. It was shown that representing the field as a collection of plane waves arriving from various directions simplifies both source localization and beamforming. In this paper, these results are extended to the case of the cylindrical array. Similarly to the spherical array case, localization and beamforming based on plane-wave decomposition perform as well as the traditional orthogonal function based methods while being numerically more stable. Both simulated and experimental results are presented.