An Algorithm for Microphone Array Sparse Arrangement and Acoustic Imaging

Acoustic imaging is a technology for visualizing sound fields, which can be used in fault diagnosis of power equipment and gas leak detection. A spiral microphone array with a large number of microphones is generally used in ultrasonic acoustic imaging, but its application is limited due to the high cost. This paper addresses the issue of the high cost for acoustic imaging microphone arrays. On one hand, an adaptability function suitable for acoustic imaging applications is designed, and the genetic algorithm is used for sparse array arrangement to reduce the cost. On the other hand, the beam forming algorithm is also improved by using a time-varying smoothing coefficient to update the cross-power spectral matrix, further enhancing the performance. Experimental results show that by using the algorithms proposed in this paper, a sparse array can achieve acoustic imaging performance close to that of a large array, the cost of usage is significantly reduced.