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Sound Perspectives
Paul J. Gendron
Postal:
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 285 Old Westport Road Dartmouth, Massachusetts 02747 USA
Email:
pgendron@umassd.edu
TECHNICAL COMMITTEE REPORT
Signal Processing
Signal Processing Technical Committee members advance and disseminate improved methods for drawing inferences from acoustic measurements.
The Technical Committee (TC) on Signal Processing (SP) in Acoustics (TCSP) has the purpose of advancing and disseminating improved methods for drawing infer- ences from an ever-increasing volume of acoustic measurements. The TCSP seeks to take maximal advantage of the increasing available computational resources in order to explore and exploit the great volumes of acoustic observations that are presently available. The members of the TCSP develop flexible and accurate mod- eling schemes that permit the seamless modeling of such acoustic measurements across significant spatial and temporal domains.
The TCSP continues to expand its reach to a wider range of problems in acoustics and to more adaptable and varied modeling regimens. The TCSP develops meth- ods so that these more flexible models can capture realistic dependencies and can be applied to large and varied acoustic observation sets. TCSP members are inter- ested in extracting the maximal amount of information from these datasets, and we therefore strive for improved statistical efficiency leading to a sharper resolu- tion of the problem at hand. By developing efficient computational schemes, the TCSP makes available the testing of hypotheses that were previously out of reach just a few decades ago. In doing this, TCSP members not only address questions that are highly germane to SP itself, but they also reach out across many other TCs to collaborate on a diverse range of problems that benefit from SP expertise.
The TCSP has its origins well over 30 years ago as scientists and researchers from the diverse Acoustical Society of America (ASA) communities began to share their statistical models, inference methodologies, and acoustic SP algorithms. This group grew into the Interdisciplinary Technical Group on Signal Processing (ITG-SP) in 1994, and as the demands for greater accuracy in inference over a wider range of acoustic hypotheses expanded, the ITG-SP flowered into the TCSP in 2000. Since this time, the TCSP has grown and continues to expand its reach into challenging inference problems where complex acoustical processes shape observations. The methods of describing model regimens and parameters as well as linking models to the observations have matured and continue to increase in relevance to acoustic sensing.
Topics addressed in the TCSP are diverse and varied. These include, but are in no ways limited to, detection of objects by either their acoustic signature or their scattered acoustic field from an active acoustic source; estimation of the location or direction of motion of an acoustic source; tracking of acoustic sources in mul- tipath reverberant environments; acoustic nondestructive testing of material; and acoustic inverse problems both underwater and in air as well as optimal processing of acoustic observations recorded from unconventional configurations of acoustic sensors. The TCSP has a strong interest in drawing inferences regarding the acous- tic media, acoustic tomography, and boundary interrogation for detection or es-
©2017 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved. volume 13, issue 3 | Fall 2017 | Acoustics Today | 63