A Synthetic Aperture Acoustic Short-Range Imaging System in the Audible Domain

We present a sonic imaging system based on a single audible sound source, a large aperture microphone array and existing aperture synthesis signal processing. The aim of our study was the computation of an interferometric image of the measurement surface from the phases of two aperture synthesis images resulting from vertically shifted sensor arrays. The results of our measurements demonstrate that objects can be detected and localized in the intensity image within a short range. Topographic mapping based on interferometric phase calculations appears not to be possible due to the influence of the room acoustics on the phases of the reflected received signals.