Patent Document ID: 20110071797
Application ID: 12901510
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for determining the unknown physical sources of an object arising from a physical excitation of the object that produces the sources, the object having associated therewith a system interaction matrix that is characteristic of the object and that depends on the object's geometry and constitutive materials, comprising: determining source locations from a geometry of the object stored in a tangible memory of the computer; ordering source locations according to their distance from a reference point and grouping the source locations so that factors of the system interaction matrix can be approximated by blocks of low rank; logically partitioning the system interaction matrix into blocks so that a dimension of a block corresponds to a number of unknown source locations in a group, the logical partition created without computing the system interaction matrix; for the partition chosen, computing terms of a factorization of the logically partitioned system interaction matrix, terms of the factorization being computed and stored in a compressed outer product form to substantially reduce a number of computations and memory space required to determine the physical sources; determining the physical sources from terms of the compressed factorization and the physical excitation.