A gentle introduction to beamforming

With this video, we participate in the Fast Forward Science 2021/22 competition www.fastforwardscience.de

Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying restrictions people worldwide have changed their way of working. The use of video conferencing platforms has skyrocketed and will continue to grow even after the pandemic ends. Gartner predicts that by 2024 only 25% of business meetings will take place in person [1].
Technical solutions are needed to ensure high audio quality in fully online and hybrid conferencing settings. Beamforming is one of the technologies that can actively improve the sound quality in such distance meetings. (for publications and further information see [2])
Moreover, beamforming is applied to help hearing-impaired people to pick out individual voices in loud environments [3]. The World Health Organization predicts that there will be 630 million hearing-impaired people by 2030 globally due to a growing and aging population [4]. This makes accessibility of hearing care and technologies for everyone essential.

In this video, we give a gentle introduction to beamforming fundamentals by introducing the delay-and-sum beamformer. The video is supposed to help students to learn audio-processing fundamentals which are an excellent basis for the lectures at AudioLabs (https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/edu.... The animations are generated with the Python library Manim. The video was submitted to the Summer of Math Exposition 2021 (SoME1) where it was rated as one of the best 100 math videos from approximately 1300 submissions. By Anna Leschanowsky, Wolfgang Mack, Emanuël Habets.

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/p...
[2] https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/fau...
[3] https://www.idmt.fraunhofer.de/en/Pre...
[4] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/h...
[5] Manim - Mathematical Animation Engine Version used by 3Blue1Brown, https://github.com/3b1b/manim
[6] https://freesound.org/people/SoundsEx...

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