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• Space-snapshot representation for acoustic imaging in a complex, noisy environment is investigated. • Low rank and Mixture of Gaussian modeling are proposed to achieve significant denoising performance. • Comparisons with other methods are made in simulations and experiments to verify the effect of the state-of-the-art methods. The microphone array can simultaneously obtain the multi-dimensional information (space-time-frequency) of sound sources, which is recognized as a fundamental and powerful tool in acoustic imaging. Acoustic Beamforming is one of the widely used methods in acoustic imaging. However, most of the applications of beamforming are based on the Gaussian noise assumption, which is not always accurate in on-site measurements. For example, shock noise with a skewed probability density function (PDF) may appear on the signal record when the turbulent eddies are not controlled. Thus, in this paper, the conventional Gaussian noise model is extended to a Gaussian mixture noise model, which can approximate any probability distribution of the noise in theory. The space-snapshot representation of microphone array measurements is further modeled as a combination of the low-rank matrix part (measurements from the sound sources) and a Gaussian mixture matrix part (measurement noise). The signal from the sources of interest is finally recovered by the Expectation–maximization algorithm, which iterates between the low-rank approximation of the sound sources and the estimation of the parameter of the Gaussian mixture model. The proposed method is further investigated with simulations and compared with robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and Gaussian-based probabilistic factor analysis (PFA). It is concluded that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beamforming technology is an essential method in acoustic imaging or reconstruction, which has been widely used in sound source localization and noise reduction. The beamforming algorithm can be described as all microphones in a plane simultaneously recording the source signal. The source position is then localized by maximizing the result of the beamformer. Evidence has shown that the accuracy of the sound source localization in a 2D plane can be improved by the non-synchronous measurements of moving the microphone array. In this paper, non-synchronous measurements are applied to 3D beamforming, in which the measurement array envelops the 3D sound source space to improve the resolution of the 3D space. The entire radiated object is covered better by a virtualized large or high-density microphone array, and the range of beamforming frequency is also expanded. The 3D imaging results are achieved in different ways: the conventional beamforming with a planar array, the non-synchronous measurements with orthogonal moving arrays, and the non-synchronous measurements with non-orthogonal moving arrays. The imaging results of the non-synchronous measurements are compared with the synchronous measurements and analyzed in detail. The number of microphones required for measurement is reduced compared with the synchronous measurement. The non-synchronous measurements with non-orthogonal moving arrays also have a good resolution in 3D source localization. The proposed approach is validated with a simulation and experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic imaging from non-synchronous measurements is a powerful method that can achieve excellent performance of a densely sampled large array by using an arbitrary prototype array. It has attracted significant interest recently since it is beyond the fundamental limitation of the working frequency determined by the size and microphone spacing of an array. One basic assumption of the non-synchronous measurements theory is the spatial continuity of the acoustic field, which is implemented by introducing the spatial basis function. Nevertheless, a comprehensive investigation of spatial basis function in the context of non-synchronous measurements is still missing. Two kinds of methods are proposed to construct spatial basis functions based on the homogeneous Helmholtz equation solution in this paper. One is the generalized harmonic polynomials (GHPs) and the other is the plane wave expansion (the quasi-uniform plane wave and the non-uniform plane wave). Comparisons of their spectral matrix completion errors show that the proposed construction methods of spatial bases can both yield low errors. Moreover, the construction of the proposed bases is simple to be implemented with only one dimension parameter to be chosen and suitable for the complex sound field. The effectiveness of the proposed bases in the non-synchronous measurements is also validated with simulations and an experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]