Deconvoluting acoustic beamforming maps with a deep neural network

Localization and quantification of noise sources is an important scientific and industrial problem, the use of phased arrays of microphones being the standard techniques in many applications. Non-physical artifacts appears on the output due to the nature of the method, thus, a supplementary step known as deconvolution is often performed. The use of data-driven machine learning can be a candidate to solve such problem. Neural networks can be extremely advantageous since no hypothesis concerning the environment or the characteristics of the sources are necessary, different from classical deconvolution techniques. Information on the acoustic propagation is implicitly extracted from pairs of source-output maps. On this work, a convolutional neural network is trained to deconvolute the beamforming map obtained from synthetic data simulating the response of an array of microphones. Quality of the estimation and the computational cost are compared to those of classical deconvolution methods (DAMAS, CLEAN-SC). Constraints associated with the size of the dataset used for training the neural network are also investigated and presented.