  Phased microphone arrays are used widely in the applications for acoustic
source localization. Deconvolution approaches such as DAMAS successfully
overcome the spatial resolution limit of the conventional delay-and-sum (DAS)
beamforming method. However deconvolution approaches require high computational
effort compared to conventional DAS beamforming method. This paper presents a
novel method that serves to improve the efficiency of DAMAS via wavelet
compression computational grid rather than via optimizing DAMAS algorithm. In
this method, the efficiency of DAMAS increases with compression ratio. This
method can thus save lots of run time in industrial applications for sound
source localization, particularly when sound sources are just located in a
small extent compared with scanning plane and a band of angular frequency needs
to be calculated. In addition, this method largely retains the spatial
resolution of DAMAS on original computational grid, although with a minor
deficiency that the occurrence probability of aliasing increasing slightly for
complicated sound source.

Sound