Although the back cover of this book states that it is about noise source identification and sound field visualization, it actually covers much more, most notably, broadband acoustic beamforming and the use of beamforming for speech processing, among other topics.

After a very short introductory chapter that describes the core issues to be discussed, the book continues with a chapter on theoretical acoustics essentials. This is a highly mathematical chapter, although care was taken to clearly explain the results shown. Chapter 3 is supposed to deal with array processing. It does indeed do that, but without much depth. Instead, after a few pages on that subject, the authors switch to a more thorough introduction of discrete-time signal processing, including some essential information about parameter estimation and optimization in the context of microphone arrays. Chapters 4 and 5 give a very thorough presentation of the state of the art of theoretical development in far-field and near-field array processing. In a certain sense, these chapters form the core of the book.

I cannot say enough about chapter 6, without which the book would be incomplete, despite the high quality of the other chapters. It deals with the numerous big and small practical details that actually make the algorithms work.

Chapters 7 and 8 focus on speech enhancement through microphone beamforming. Chapter 7 presents classical minimum variance distortionless response array processing for microphone arrays, while chapter 8 discusses the dominant model of beamforming for speech enhancement purposes, namely frequency domain beamforming.

Chapter 9, which spans more than 100 pages, is an indispensable resource for information on transitioning from theoretical discussions to practical measurements and implementations. This chapter presents several example implementations of noise measurement, visualizations, and enhancements, and is invaluable for any practitioner in the field. The book concludes with remarks and thoughts about promising directions for new research and development.

Overall, while making it through all 500-plus pages of this book is not the easiest of tasks, the reward is a solid understanding of broadband microphone array processing that goes well beyond the basics.