Patent ID: 9264799
Filing Date: 2016-02-16
CPC Classification: H04R

Claim Text:
1. A method for creating an acoustic map of an environment having at least one acoustic source, comprising: surrounding the environment with an array of microphones that contains 1000 or more microphones in the array; a processor determining a plurality of disjoint spatial masks associated with the array of microphones covering the environment, each mask defining a different pass region for a signal and a plurality of complementary rejection regions, wherein the environment is monitored by the array of microphones; the processor determining for each mask in the plurality of disjoint spatial masks a defined subset of microphones in the array of microphones and a beamforming filter for each of the microphones in the defined subset of microphones that maximizes a gain for the pass region and minimizes gain for the complementary rejection regions associated with each mask according to an optimization criterion that does not depend on the at least one acoustic source in the environment; and the processor applying the plurality of disjoint spatial masks in a scanning action across the environment on signals generated by microphones in the array of microphones to detect the acoustic source and its location in the environment, wherein for each applied spatial mask only samples generated by the corresponding defined subset of microphones are processed by the processor.