Compressive Sensing for over-the-air ultrasound

The advent of Compressive Sensing has provided significant mathematical tools to enhance the sensing capabilities of hardware devices. In this paper we apply Compressive Sensing to improve over-the-air ultrasonic sensing capabilities. We demonstrate that using an appropriate scene model it is possible to pose three-dimensional surface reconstruction of a scene as a sparse recovery problem. By transmitting incoherent wideband ultrasonic pulses and receiving their reflections a sensor array can sense the scene and reconstruct it using standard CS reconstruction algorithms. We further demonstrate that it possible to construct virtual arrays that exploit the sensors' motion. Thus we can obtain three-dimensional scene reconstruction using a linear mobile array.