03 Jun World’s first acoustic autofocus

Autofocus is well known in optical cameras, it gives crisp images and prevents from getting any blur at the focus distance. Acoustic cameras also need to be well focused, otherwise images produced are blurry and difficult to understand. To make sure no acoustic source, such as gas leak remains undetected, we developed an acoustic autofocus able to find the distance of a sound source in real-time while getting crisp ultrasound images. In addition, this distance, combined with the amplitude received at the microphones, is used to estimate the source sound level, which in turn is used, for example, to calculate the flow rate of a leak.