Compensation for source nonstationarity in multireference, scan-based near-field acoustical holography

Multireference, scan-based near-field acoustical holography is a useful measurement tool that can be applied when an insufficient number of microphones is available to make measurements on a complete hologram surface simultaneously. The scan-based procedure can be used to construct a complete hologram by joining together subholograms captured using a relatively small, roving scan array and a fixed reference array. For the procedure to be successful, the source levels must remain stationary for the time taken to record the complete hologram; that is unlikely to be the case in practice, however. Usually, the reference signal levels measured during each scan differ from each other with the result that spatial noise is added to the hologram. A procedure to suppress the effects of source level, and hence reference level, variations is proposed here. The procedure is based on a formulation that explicitly features the acoustical transfer functions between the sources and both the reference and scanning, field microphones. When it is assumed that source level changes do not affect the sources' directivity, a nonstationarity compensation procedure can be derived that is based on measured transfer functions between the reference and field microphones. It has been verified both experimentally and in numerical simulations that the proposed procedure can help suppress spatially distributed noise caused by the type of source level nonstationarity that is characteristic of realistic sources.