Delay-Multiply-And-Sum Beamforming for Real-Time In-Air Acoustic Imaging

Abstract: In-air acoustic imaging systems demand beamforming techniques that offer a high dynamic range and spatial resolution while also remaining robust. Conventional Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamforming fails to meet these quality demands due to high sidelobes, a wide main lobe and the resulting low contrast, whereas advanced adaptive methods are typically precluded by the computational cost and the single-snapshot constraint of real-time field operation. To overcome this trade-off, we propose and detail the implementation of higher-order non-linear beamforming methods using the Delay-Multiply-and-Sum technique, coupled with Coherence Factor weighting, specifically adapted for ultrasonic in-air microphone arrays. Our efficient implementation allows for enabling GPU-accelerated, real-time performance on embedded computing platforms. Through validation against the DAS baseline using simulated and real-world acoustic data, we demonstrate that the proposed method provides significant improvements in image contrast, establishing higher-order non-linear beamforming as a practical, high-performance solution for in-air acoustic imaging.