BINARIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR ACOUSTIC DATA ANALYSIS

A method of enhancing acoustic pump data for monitoring of pump condition in operation. The enhancement may be in the form of a substantial reduction in the amount of data to be processed by firmware to a much more manageable level. This may be achieved through pre-filtering of acquired acoustic data, computing frequency moments, and by application of a median filter to the acoustic data. Regardless, a binarization technique that uses features vector including but not limited to double-threshold derived from statistics of enhanced amplitudes, may be employed whereby enhanced acoustic data is boiled down to a series of potential acoustic events of particular widths. These widths may represent a duration of each acoustic event and be checked for correlation with the speed of the operating speed of the pump. Acoustic events that correlate with an operating speed of the pump may represent an unhealthy condition of the pump such as where the width is about the duration of one half of a cycle of the pump and a leaky pump valve presents itself for this same period of time.