Truncated aperture extrapolation for Fourier-based near-field acoustic holography by means of border-padding.

Although near-field acoustic holography (NAH) is recognized as a powerful and extremely fast acoustic imaging method based on the inverse solution of the wave-equation, its practical implementation has suffered from problems with the use of the discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) in combination with small aperture sizes and windowing. In this paper, a method is presented that extrapolates the finite spatial aperture before the DFT is applied, which is based on the impulse response information of the known aperture data. The developed method called linear predictive border-padding is an aperture extrapolation technique that greatly reduces leakage and spatial truncation errors in planar NAH (PNAH). Numerical simulations and actual measurements on a hard-disk drive and a cooling fan illustrate the low error, high speed, and utilization of border-padding. Border-padding is an aperture extrapolation technique that makes PNAH a practical and accurate inverse near-field acoustic imaging method.