Noise cancelling for microphone arrays

In this paper an application of the noise cancelling method for suppression of noise of a microphone array system is discussed. First an overview of the noise cancelling approach is given. This is followed by a description of the employment of the method in a realized microphone array system. The limiting factors are described and theoretical limits of the noise suppression are derived. Experimental results, which are obtained in a realistic environment, are presented. The results show that depending on the recording situation the noise cancelling approach applied to a microphone array system leads to a significant enhancement of the signal to noise ratio of the array output signal.