Compensation for discarded singular values in vibro-acoustic inverse methods

The paper addresses the inverse problem where source strengths are back-calculated from a sound pressure field sampled at several points. Regularization techniques, such as singular value discarding or Tikhonov regularization, are commonly used to improve estimates of source strength in such situations. However, over-regularization can result in even worse errors. A simple procedure is proposed here to compensate for errors of over-regularization. The basis is to constrain the solution such that the spatial mean of the measured and reconstructed sound pressure are equal. In other words, to set the overall sound power of the equivalent (calculated) sources equal to that of the real source. It is argued that the overall sound power is the most stable and reliable quantity on which to base source strength estimates. Examples of both singular value discarding and Tikhonov regularization are given.