SPATIAL RESOLUTION ENHANCEMENT VIA HYBRID ESTIMATION APPROACHES

Since the beamforming concept was first introduced to acoustic engineers, the acoustic phase array has become one of the most popular techniques used to identify noise sources. Generally speaking, the spatial resolution of the acoustic camera is proportional to the number of microphones and array size. The larger the array, the better the spatial resolution. In order to achieve better spatial resolution for a given microphone array structure, recently the so-called CLEAN method was proposed. However, if the noise sources are close to each other, then the non-parametric peak estimation in CLEAN method will fail to distinguish different sources. To overcome this shortness, this paper proposes to apply MUSIC and ESPRIT parametric algorithms for initial peak detection before performing CLEAN. As real world experiments indicate, the resulting hybrid approach can significantly improve the spatial resolution obtained by the original CLEAN method