A comparison of near-field beamforming and acoustical holography for sound source visualization

Acoustical holography procedures make high-resolution visualization possible via estimation of the sound intensity on surfaces closer to the sources than the near-field measurement surface. Another source localization technique, beamforming, has been used to estimate the direction of arrival of sound from sources that typically lie in the far-field. However, little work has been done using beamforming as a visualization technique based on near-field measurements. As a result, the performance of beamforming and acoustical holography in terms of source resolution capabilities has not been directly compared when using near-field measurements. In this work, point source beamforming was used to visualize sources based on near-field measurements. Acoustic intensity estimated from beamformed pressure measurements was compared with the absolute intensity estimated using acoustical holography techniques. In addition to noise-free, anechoic simulations, cases of measurement pressure with random noise were generated and used to compare source resolution accuracy of acoustical holography and beamforming techniques in the presence of measurement noise. It was found that intensity estimated using acoustical holography provided the clearest image of sources when the measurement surface was conformal with the source geometry. However, sources can be resolved more accurately using near-field beamforming than acoustical holography at high frequencies when the sources are not located perfectly on a surface conformal with the measurement geometry.