Signal processing for optical sound field measurement and visualization

Abstract

Accurately measuring sound pressure is not an easy task because every microphone has its own mechanical and electrical characteristics. Moreover, the existence of a measuring instrument inside the field causes reflection and diffraction which deform the wavefront of sound to be measured. Ideally, a sensing device should not have any characteristic nor exist inside a measuring region. Although it may sound unrealistic, optical measurement methods are able to realize such ideal situation. Optical devices can be placed outside the sound field, and some of the sensing techniques, which decode information of sound from the phase of light, are able to cancel optical and electrical characteristics. Thus, optical sound measurement methods have possibility of achieving higher accuracy than ordinary sound measurement in principle. However, they have two main drawbacks that have prevented their applications in acoustics: (1) point-wise information cannot be obtained directly because observed signal is spatially integrated along the optical path; and (2) increasing signal-to-noise ratio is difficult because optical measurement of less than a nanometer order is typically required. To overcome the above difficulties, we have proposed several signal processing methods. Here, those methods are introduced with the physical principle of optical sound measurement.