A Fast Ray Space Transform for Wave Field Processing using Acoustic Arrays

The importance of soundfield imaging techniques is expected to further increase in the next few years thanks to the ever-increasing availability of low-cost sensors such as MEMS microphones. When it comes to processing a relevant number of sensor signals, however, the computational load of space-time processing algorithms easily grows to unmanageable levels. The Ray Space Transform (RST) was recently introduced as a promising tool for soundfield analysis. Given the collection of signals captured by a uniform linear array of microphones, the RST allows us to collect and map the directional components of the acoustic field onto a domain called “ray space”, where relevant acoustic objects are represented as linear patterns for advanced acoustic analysis and synthesis applications. So far the computational complexity of the RST linearly increases with the number of microphones. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper we propose an alternative efficient implementation of the RST based on the Non Uniform Fast Fourier Transform.