Methodologies for characterizing ultrasonic transducers using neural network and pattern recognition techniques

System hardware for characterizing ultrasonic transducers and the associated data acquisition software and characterizing algorithms are considered. The hardware consists mainly of a workstation computer, a receiver/pulser with gated peak detector, various monitoring devices, a microcomputer-based 3D positioning controller, and an A/D converter. The characterization algorithms are based on neural network and pattern recognition techniques. It is found that artificial neural network techniques provide far better classification results than the pattern recognition techniques. A multilayer backpropagation neural network which provides a classification accuracy of 94% is developed. Two other multilayer neural networks-sum-of-products and a newly devised neural network called hybrid sum-of-products-have a classification accuracy of 90% and 93%, respectively. The most successful pattern recognition technique for this application is found to be the perceptron, which provides a classification accuracy of 77%. >