Optimized microphone deployment for near-field acoustic holography: To be, or not to be random, that is the question

Abstract

Arrays with sparse and random sensor deployment are known to be capable of delivering high quality far-field images without grating lobes. This raises the question of whether or not this idea can be applied to near-field imaging as well. To answer this question that has not yet been widely investigated in previous research, numerical simulations are undertaken in this paper to optimize the microphone deployment for both far-field and near-field arrays with the latter being the main focus. In the simulation, a recently introduced near-field equivalent source imaging (NESI) technique is employed for the near-field imaging. Global optimization techniques including the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and the intra-block Monte Carlo (IBMC) algorithm are exploited to find the optimal microphone position efficiently. The combined use of the SA and the IBMC algorithms enables efficient search for satisfactory deployment with excellent beam pattern and relatively uniform distribution of microphones. In the near-field optimization, a special kind of beam pattern and cost function definition is used for the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) imaging problem. As indicated by the simulation results, random deployment of microphones is necessary to avoid grating lobes in far-field imaging. In the near-field simulation, all results suggest that the optimal near-field array is the uniform rectangular array (URA) and the random deployment presents no particular benefit in near-field imaging.