Method of Merging the Divergence Sparsity and Simplified Acousto-Optic Interferometry to Sense an Acoustic Wave Field

Abstract

This paper proposes a method of sensing an acoustic wave field by merging the divergence sparsity and the acousto-optic interferometry. For simplicity, we call this method the Compressed Acousto-optic Interferometry. Specifically, the Compressed Acousto-optic Interferometry refers to the integration of compressed tomography with acousto-optic interferometry, which is a potential solution for the real-time capture of an acoustic wave field that will apply in building future sonar systems. In this sensing regime, two important improvements to the preceding works are: (1) using a specific diffraction order of the sensing laser caused by the acousto-optic effect to establish the interferometer, which omits the reference arms broadly adopted in conventional experiments; (2) using the sparse extremums of a cross-section of the acoustic wave field as the features to integrate the compressed sensing into the construction of an acoustic wave field, which will reduce the number of necessary lasers and photodetectors. Detailed construction of the corresponding mathematical model, simulations and experiments are presented in this paper. The results show that the Compressed Acousto-optic Interferometry proposed is potentially an effective method for capturing the acoustic wave field in real-time, maintaining the accuracy of the reconstruction, as well as reducing the number of laser-photodetector pairs by more than 30%.