A LINEAR OPERATOR FOR THE COMPUTATION OF SOUND FIELD MAPS

L. Bianchi, V. Baldini Anastasio, D. Markovi, F. Antonacci, A. Sarti, S. Tubaro

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Italia

Abstract
In the process of soundfield imaging, as defined in the literature, a microphone array is subdivided into overlapping subarrays and soundfield images are obtained by juxtaposition of spatial
spectra computed from individual subarray data. In this paper we show that the whole process can be conveniently seen as a linear transformation applied to array data. This linear transformation
embeds a nonlinear mapping to cast the directional information in a more convenient domain: the ray space. We show by simulations that the proposed formulation is suitable for fast
implementation of the soundfield imaging operation, and, more specifically, for the localization of acoustic sources.

1.

Soundfield Imaging and the Plenacoustic Function

The Directional Plenacoustic Function

Function of position and direction of propagation
Analogous to plenoptic function

Soundfield camera

Soundfield imaging is an estimate of the energy of the plenacoustic

function

Wideband extension by averaging estimates at individual frequencies

Acoustic camera

SOUNDFIELD IMAGE

Ray space
representation
microphone array

Array of M microphones
Signal captured by the array

sub-array

1.
2.
3.

Beamforming (Delay and Sum)

2.

Soundfield Mapping

Soundfield imaging
Estimates the energy of the
directional plenacoustic function

Subdivide the array into overlapping subarrays

Beamforming on each subarray
Mapping to the Ray Space

3.

Soundfield mapping
Estimates amplitude and phase of
the directional plenacoustic function

Acoustic primitives are mapped in the ray space as linear patterns

A point source appears in the ray space as a line

Steering matrix is the same for all subarrays

Steering matrix is independent on data, thanks to the the selected
beamforming technique
Spatial spectrum for the ith subarray

Source locations and

microphone array

Beamforming operations towards pre-selected directions 1 , ,

Focus subarray signals towards each direction using the steering matrix

Proof of concepts

Localization in the ray space

Array subdivided into M-W+1 subarrays

Signal captured by ith subarray

Multiple Beamforming Operations

Write the overal process as a linear transformation

of array signals
Build a soundfield representation with both
magnitude and phase information

m
Wideband soundfield image

Find maxima in each row

m
Find line of best fit

Setup

M=16 microphones with spacing 6.67 cm; W=5 microphones in each subarray
Sampling frequency set to 16 kHz
Localization performed on short-time signal segments of length 250 ms
Single source moving on a throchoidal trajectory

Results
Monte-Carlo simulations with signal to noise ratio equal to 30 dB
Localization accuracy evaluated through the root mean-squared error

Soundfield map
Analysis equation
Microphone position
Source trajectory
Estimated source position

RMSE

Synthesis equation

Relation with Soundfield imaging

Soundfield image is obtained as the magnitud of the soundfield map averaged
over the signal observation time interval

References

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IEEE Int. Conf. On Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 20-25 March 2016, Shanghai, China