The microphone array is the heart of Kinect audio. Before we start talking about what a microphone array is and how it works, let's first have a quick look at what the major challenges and focus area of Kinect audio were.
The major focus area of Kinect's audio processing was human speech recognition and recognizing the voice of the players when they are moving around and are in different positions.
The first challenge was identifying audio with loud sound. Consider a situation where you are playing a game and a loud sound is coming from some different source, such as a TV. That creates difficulty in recognizing the player's voice because of the loud sound as well as the echo and noises in the room.
The second major challenge was to identify the speech within a dynamic range of area. While playing, the player could change his position, or multiple players could be speaking from different directions.
To overcome all these problems and...