Patent ID: 7839721

Claim:
A method for processing output from at least one acoustic vector sensor, the method comprising: calculating the modal beam amplitude response (b mn (θ,φ,θ 1 ,φ 1 )) for each of plural modal beams, said calculating of the modal beam amplitude response including using the matrix-product equation b mn =w mn †d, wherein d is the data vector representing signals from said at least one acoustic vector sensor, (m) is the vertical order of each said modal beam amplitude response, (n) is the horizontal order of each said modal beam amplitude response, and w mn (θ,φ,θ 1 ,φ 1 ) is the following set of modal weighting vectors: w mnx ≡cos( m θ−( m− 1)θ 1 )cos( n φ−( n− 1)φ 1 ) w mny ≡cos( m θ−( m− 1)θ 1 )sin( n φ−( n −1)φ 1 ) w mnz ≡sin( m θ−( m− 1)θ 1 : calculating the directional beam amplitude response (b dirMN ) for all of said modal beams, said calculating of the directional beam amplitude response including using the summation equation b dirMN = ∑ mn ⁢ b mn , wherein b dirMN is the sum of all said modal beam amplitude responses up to selected maximum vertical order (M) and selected maximum horizontal order (N).