US 12,231,843 B2
Wideband DOA improvements for fixed and dynamic beamformers
Trisha Batzer, North Salt Lake, UT (US)
Assigned to ClearOne, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT (US)
Filed by ClearOne, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT (US)
Filed on Aug. 11, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/819,093.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/260,270, filed on Aug. 14, 2021.
Prior Publication US 2023/0050677 A1, Feb. 16, 2023
Int. Cl. H04R 1/40 (2006.01); H04R 3/00 (2006.01)
CPC H04R 1/406 (2013.01) [H04R 3/005 (2013.01); H04R 2201/401 (2013.01)] 8 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. An apparatus that improves Direction of Arrival (DOA) determinations, comprising:
a plurality of microphones coupled together as a microphone array used for beamforming, the plurality of microphones are positioned at predetermined locations and produce audio signals to be used to form a directional pickup pattern;
a processor, memory, storage, and a power supply operably coupled to the microphone array, the processor configured to execute the following steps:
processing an algorithm for a Direction of Arrival (DOA) determination;
supplemental processing that improves the DOA processing that includes:
de-noising the audio signal that further includes using one or more of the following: (a) deep learning networks (DLN), (b) artificial intelligence (AI), or (c) machine learning (ML):
Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) processing the audio signal;
one or more of the following: frequency band scoring the audio signal or energy weighting the audio signal;
one or more of the following: (a) noise suppression, (b) noise cancellation of in-band noise, or (c) second order IIR filter of the audio signal.