Obtaining Prior Information for Ultrasonic Signal Reconstruction from FRI Sparse Sampling Data

Finite rate of innovation sampling is a novel sub-Nyquist sampling method that can reconstruct a signal from sparse sampling data. The application of this method in ultrasonic testing greatly reduces the signal sampling rate and the quantity of sampling data. However, the pulse number of the signal must be known beforehand for the signal reconstruction procedure. The accuracy of this prior information directly affects the accuracy of the estimated parameters of the signal and influences the assessment of flaws, leading to a lower defect detection ratio. Although the pulse number can be pre-given by theoretical analysis, the process is still unable to assess actual complex random orientation defects. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method that uses singular value decomposition (SVD) for estimating the pulse number from sparse sampling data and avoids the shortcoming of providing the pulse number in advance for signal reconstruction. When the sparse sampling data have been acquired from the ultrasonic signal, these data are transformed to discrete Fourier coefficients. A Hankel matrix is then constructed from these coefficients, and SVD is performed on the matrix. The decomposition coefficients reserve the information of the pulse number. When the decomposition coefficients generated by noise according to noise level are removed, the number of the remaining decomposition coefficients is the signal pulse number. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified through simulation experiments. The applicability was tested in ultrasonic experiments by using sample flawed pipelines. Results from simulations and real experiments demonstrated the efficiency of this method.