ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,395,772, issued on Aug. 19, was assigned to PANASONIC INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CORPORATION OF AMERICA (Torrance, Calif.).
"Sound pickup device" was invented by Seigo Enomoto (Kyoto, Japan), Yoshifumi Hirose (Kyoto, Japan) and Shinichi Yuzuriha (Osaka, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A sound pickup device includes microphone elements arranged three-dimensionally in a distributed manner. A total number of effective microphone pairs is greater than a total number of the microphone elements, the effective microphone pairs each being a combination of two microphone elements having a distance less than a distance D between each other. The di...