A beamforming system based on the acousto-optic effect

摘要

Beamforming techniques are usually based on microphone arrays. The present work uses a beam of light as a sensor element, and describes a beamforming system that locates sound sources basedon the acousto-optic effect, this is, the interaction between sound and light. The use of light as a sensing element makes this method immune to spatial aliasing. This feature is illustrated by means ofsimulation and experimental results. For ease of comparison, the study is supplemented with results obtained with a line array of microphones