2D SAFT technique to reduce grating lobes in volumetric imaging

Abstract Nowadays, ultrasonic imaging is widely accepted as a powerful tool for nondestructive evaluation in industrial and medical applications. Although its potential to provide volumetric images has been verified and there is a strong interest in the development of 3D system, it is an open question yet due to the large amount of required resources, the high volume of data under analysis, and the difficulty to design adequate sensors. This work is centered in the development of SAFT strategies for beamforming in 3D ultrasonic imaging systems based on a strong economy of resources in order to reduce complexity and cost, and improve the system portability. The use of synthetic aperture techniques (SAFT) to reduce the number of hardware channels has been a topic profusely studied in several application areas, such as radar, sonar or ultrasonic imaging. The conventional SAFT is based on the sequential activation, one by one, of the array elements in emission-reception. Once all the signals have been stored, the beamforming is applied in a post-processing stage, focusing every point in the image and correcting emission and reception simultaneously. SAFT images show higher lateral resolution than conventional phased array images, but unfortunately they also show grating lobes that reduce the contrast. Here we present a new SAFT technique for 2D arrays that eliminates the grating lobes making use of few resources. Thus, the technique requires no more than four reception channels in parallel for every emission. Experimental results are also presented to validate the simulations.