Patent ID: 7826624

Claim:
A system comprising: a set of microphones; memory that stores program instructions; a processor configured to read and execute the program instructions from the memory, wherein the program instructions, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: (a) receive an input signal corresponding to each of the microphones; (b) transform the input signals into the frequency domain to obtain respective input spectra; (c) operate on the input spectra with a set of virtual beams to obtain respective beam-formed spectra, wherein each of the virtual beams is associated with a corresponding frequency range and a corresponding subset of the input spectra, wherein each of the virtual beams operates on portions of input spectra of the corresponding subset of input spectra which have been band limited to the corresponding frequency range, wherein the virtual beams include one or more low end beams and one or more high end beams, wherein each of the low end beams is a beam of a corresponding integer order, wherein each of the high end beams is a delay-and-sum beam; (d) compute a linear combination of the beam-formed spectra to obtain a resultant spectrum; and (e) inverse transform the resultant spectrum to obtain a resultant signal.