Achieving high-resolution 3D acoustic imaging in a large-aspect-ratio cabin by the non-synchronous measurements

•The non-synchronous measurements in the large-aspect-ratio cabin is investigated.•Non-synchronous measurements is applied to suppress reverberation interference.•The optimal spherical array measurement scheme and basis functions are determined. The resolution of conventional acoustic imaging methods in a large-aspect-ratio cabin is reduced seriously by array parameters limitation and reverberation. The non-synchronous measurements technique breaks through the limitation of array shape and the number of microphones. This method can approximate the result of synthetic large-aperture array acoustic imaging. The increase in the number of microphones and low-rank constraint assumption in non-synchronous measurements suppress the reverberation interference. The low-rank constraint filters out the eigenvalues of the reverberation sound other than the main noise sources, which is acted as an eigenvalue filter. It has been demonstrated that non-synchronous measurements with 3D beamforming can improve the resolution of acoustic imaging in cubic space, but the related research on the large-aspect-ratio cabin is still missing. The non-synchronous measurements method is applied to achieve high-resolution acoustic imaging in a large-aspect-ratio cabin in this paper. The array measurement scheme is investigated comprehensively, including the number of non-synchronous measurements, the array step distance and appropriate spatial basis functions. The experimental results show that the non-synchronous measurements can achieve high-resolution 3D acoustic imaging in the cabin of an urban rail vehicle.