An Inverse Microphone Array Method for the Estimation of a Rotating Source Directivity

Abstract

Microphone arrays methods are useful for determining the location and magnitude of rotating acoustic sources. This work presents an approach to calculating a discrete directivity pattern of a rotating sound source using inverse microphone array methods. The proposed method is divided into three consecutive steps. Firstly, a virtual rotating array method that compensates for motion of the source is employed in order to calculate the cross-spectral matrix. Secondly, the source locations are determined by a covariance matrix fitting approach. Finally, the sound source directivity is calculated using the inverse method SODIX on a reduced focus grid. Experimental validation and synthetic data from a simulation are used for the verification of the method. For this purpose, a rotating parametric loudspeaker array with a controllable steering pattern is designed. Five different directivity patterns of the rotating source are compared. The proposed method compensates for source motion and is able to reconstruct the location as well the directivity pattern of the rotating beam source.