Robust beamforming and steering of arbitrary beam patterns using spherical arrays

Spherical microphone and loudspeaker arrays present a compact method for analysis and synthesis of arbitrary three-dimensional sound fields. However, issues such as sensor self noise, placement errors, and mismatch require robustness constraints in beamformer design. This work presents a method for designing robust beam patterns with an arbitrary shape and an efficient method for steering the resulting patterns in three dimensions. The technique is used for two applications: reproducing spherical microphone array recordings over loudspeaker arrays and binaurally over headphones with head tracking.