Identification of the number and locations of acoustic sources

The identification of the number and locations of acoustic sources is a fundamental problem of engineering acoustics. The method of multiple signal classification (MUSIC) has been widely used to solve this problem. The main drawback of the MUSIC method is that the unavoidable measurement noise should be identical for all the channels of measurement system. This requirement generally cannot be met in practical application. In this work, a method was proposed to identify the number and locations of multiple incoherent sources. The proposed method was based on the traditional MUSIC method, however, without the basic assumption about the identity of the measurement noise. Besides, a procedure was proposed to improve the calculation efficiency of identification. The numerical and experimental results demonstrated that the identification accuracy of the proposed method was far better than that of the traditional MUSIC method. The results also demonstrated that the proposed calculation procedure was very efficient, only the data at a few frequencies should be used for identification.