obspy/obspy — pull request #475 by mbyt (2012-11-26 21:44:31+00:00)
Title: Generalized Beamforming

**NOTE: This pull request is used for discussion and should not be merged in yet**

This pull request adds beamforming in a much more general way. It is based on the array_analysis prototype code of @jwassermann (https://github.com/jwassermann/obspy/tree/array_analysis).

It has the following features:
* generalized beamforming via BF / covariances
* generalized beamforming via CAPON (also based on covariances)
* it returns the power map from the C-code, such that it can be saved or plotted
* pure ctypes extension
* no need any more for fftpack.c. FFTs are now done on the python side.
* generalized beamforming is nearly as fast as bbfk (factor 1.25 difference)

TODO:
* check if float precision is good enough for the relative power. This could bring performance.
* commit [haabb1fdd63b9a29b2ee72e8444058f3b12c6c821](https://github.com/mbyt/obspy/commit/aabb1fdd63b9a29b2ee72e8444058f3b12c6c821) added genbeam.so and genbeam.c which are both huge files (116 and 418 KByte). This should be deleted from repository history by rebasing
* genbeam.pyx is now obsolete and can also be deleted
* double check CAPON method. It shows quite arbitrary test results.
* currently the relative and absolute power is returned. Is the absolute power used very often, otherwise it could be optimized away.
* remove obspy/signal/src/fft which is now obsolete