Detecting pipe changes via acoustic matched field processing

Detecting pipe irregularities such as intrusions can be challenging. However, subtle changes can be identified in the complex acoustic fields measured over a range of frequencies and over a time interval given an “array” of receivers. In particular, for two receivers one can coherently process the signals via matched field processing (MFP) to infer whether or not there have been changes such as new intrusions relative to undisturbed fields measured earlier. There is no acoustic modelling of the fields required, only the simple linear processor is applied, and only test data (five scenarios) are used in this demonstration. A key advantage to using MFP plus two (or more) microphones is that absolute sound levels need not be carefully measured.