Assessment of Linear Predictive Border-padding for PNAH

Linear Predictive Border Padding (LPBP) is a recently presented aperture extrapolation technique to extend the applicability of PNAH to small spatial apertures (compared to the source size). Although Planar Near-field Acoustic Holography (PNAH) is recognized as a powerful and extremely fast acoustic imaging method, small measurement apertures over a portion of larger source structures lead to significant and often intolerable errors in the acoustic source images. In this paper an assessment of the accuracy of Linear Predictive Border Padding (LPBP) applied to Planar Near-field Acoustic Holography (PNAH) is presented based onnumerical experiments on two different source types: modal patterns and point sources. These two types of sources represent the two limit situations that one can find in practice: modal patterns have a tonal spectrum in the spatial wave-number domain and are relatively easy to reconstruct accurately, while point sources have a broad-band wave-number spectrum which makes them very challenging to reconstruct. For a given distance to the source, the position and size of the hologram plane apertures is varied. The reconstructed source information is compared to the reference source reconstruction obtained using a large aperture. The same analysis is also carried out with state-of-the-art aperture extrapolation methods. The reconstructed sources are compared both qualitatively (visual comparison) and quantitatively (RMS reconstruction error). The results show that LPBP is a fast, efficient and accurate extrapolation method, which leads to accurate reconstructions even for very small aperture sizes.