Beamforming

The process of using multiple microphones to improve signal reconstruction is called beamforming. Beamforming can significantly improve noise reduction and sound quality in noisy environments, such as in cars or on busy streets. By capturing time-of-arrival and intensity differences between sound sources, techniques like beamforming can isolate desired sounds from noise. For example, most mobile phones a forward-facing microphone for speech and a backward-facing microphone to estimate background noise, allowing for better noise suppression.