Patent ID: 7991167

Claim:
A method comprising: (a) identifying angles of acoustic sources from peaks in an amplitude envelope, wherein the amplitude envelope corresponds to an output of a virtual broadside scan on blocks of input signal samples, one block from each microphone in an array of microphones, wherein the microphones of the array are arranged on a circle, wherein the virtual broadside scan comprises scanning a virtual broadside array through a set of angles spanning the circle in order to generate said output, wherein the virtual broadside array operates on the blocks of input signal samples; (b) for each of the source angles, operating on the input signal blocks with a directed beam pointed in the direction of the source angle to obtain a corresponding beam signal; (c) classifying each source as speech or noise based on analysis of spectral characteristics of the corresponding beam signal, wherein said classifying results in one or more of the sources being classified as speech and one or more of the sources being classified as noise; (d) generating parameters for a virtual beam, pointed at a first of the speech sources, and having one or more nulls pointed at least at a subset of the one or more noise sources; (e) operating on the input signal blocks with the virtual beam to obtain an output signal; (f) transmitting the output signal to one or more remote devices.