Optimal sensor placement for the spatial reconstruction of sound fields

The estimation sound fields over space is of interest in sound field control and analysis, spatial audio, room acoustics and virtual reality. Sound fields can be estimated from a number of measurements distributed over space yet this remains a challenging problem due to the large experimental effort required. In this work we investigate sensor distributions that are optimal to estimate sound fields. Such optimization is valuable as it can greatly reduce the number of measurements required. The sensor positions are optimized with respect to the parameters describing a sound field, or the pressure reconstructed at the area of interest, by finding the positions that minimize the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB). The optimized distributions are investigated in a numerical study as well as with measured room impulse responses. We observe a reduction in the number of measurements of approximately 50% when the sensor positions are optimized for reconstructing the sound field when compared with random distributions. The results indicate that optimizing the sensors positions is also valuable when the vector of parameters is sparse, specially compared with random sensor distributions, which are often adopted in sparse array processing in acoustics.