Acoustical source tracing using independent component analysis and correlation analysis

Acoustical signals from mechanical systems reveal the operating conditions of mechanical components and thus benefit for machinery condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. However, the acoustical signals directly measured by the sensors in essential are the mixed signals of all the sources, and normally it is very difficult to be used for source identification or operating feature extraction. Therefore, this paper studies the acoustical source tracing problem using independent component analysis (ICA) and identifies the sources using correlation analysis: the measured acoustical signals are separated into independent components by independent component analysis method, and thus all the independent information of all the sources is obtained; these independent components are identified based on the prior information of the sources and correlation analysis. Therefore, all the source information contained in the measured acoustical signals can be independently separated and traced, which can provide more purer source information for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.