Multiple microphones in array configurations offer any advantages over systems with a single microphone. Due to miniature piezoelectric sensors and powerful digital signal processors, microphone arrays can now be built in a compact and inconspicuous design. This leads to a number of applications of automatically steered microphone arrays, e.g. for voice communications in cars, hands-free mobile phones, speech recognition systems, and teleconferencing systems.

Estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) is necesary for the beamformer design. Focus of this thesis is the comparison of different algorithms for DOA estimation that exist in the literature, especially under high environmental noise and reverberant conditions.