A hybrid approach to reconstruct transient sound field based on the free-field time reversal method and interpolated time-domain equivalent source method

Abstract A hybrid approach is presented in the current work, which reconstructs the transient sound field radiated from the two-dimensional sources with unknown locations and sizes, by combining the free-field time reversal method and the interpolated time-domain equivalent source method (TDESM). In the first step of the proposed method, the time reversal focusing algorithm is performed to estimate the source locations on the source plane. And then, the interpolated TDESM is applied to reconstruct the transient sound field on the reconstruction plane by assuming that the equivalent sources are located near the estimated source locations found in the previous step. The proposed technique, in principle, requires fewer microphones in the measurement since the equivalent sources are only placed in the vicinity of the ‘real’ sound sources. Reconstruction of the transient sound field radiated from the dual-planar-piston model is studied by numerical simulation for feasibility demonstration. A measurement of the sound fields radiated from two baffled loudspeakers is performed in the anechoic chamber, which shows that a better reconstruction result can be achieved by using the proposed hybrid scheme than the original interpolated TDESM with relatively the same number of sampling channels.