Blind Deconvolution of Ultrasonic Signals Using High-Order Spectral Analysis and Wavelets

Defect detection by ultrasonic method is limited by the pulse width. Resolution can be improved through a deconvolution process with a priori information of the pulse or by its estimation. In this paper a regularization of the Wiener filter using wavelet shrinkage is presented for the estimation of the reflectivity function. The final result shows an improved signal to noise ratio with better axial resolution.Comment: 8 pages, CIARP 2005, LNCS 377

Blind deconvolution of medical ultrasound images: parametric inverse filtering approach

©2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2007.910179The problem of reconstruction of ultrasound images by means of blind deconvolution has long been recognized as one of the central problems in medical ultrasound imaging. In this paper, this problem is addressed via proposing a blind deconvolution method which is innovative in several ways. In particular, the method is based on parametric inverse filtering, whose parameters are optimized using two-stage processing. At the first stage, some partial information on the point spread function is recovered. Subsequently, this information is used to explicitly constrain the spectral shape of the inverse filter. From this perspective, the proposed methodology can be viewed as a ldquohybridizationrdquo of two standard strategies in blind deconvolution, which are based on either concurrent or successive estimation of the point spread function and the image of interest. Moreover, evidence is provided that the ldquohybridrdquo approach can outperform the standard ones in a number of important practical cases. Additionally, the present study introduces a different approach to parameterizing the inverse filter. Specifically, we propose to model the inverse transfer function as a member of a principal shift-invariant subspace. It is shown that such a parameterization results in considerably more stable reconstructions as compared to standard parameterization methods. Finally, it is shown how the inverse filters designed in this way can be used to deconvolve the images in a nonblind manner so as to further improve their quality. The usefulness and practicability of all the introduced innovations are proven in a series of both in silico and in vivo experiments. Finally, it is shown that the proposed deconvolution algorithms are capable of improving the resolution of ultrasound images by factors of 2.24 or 6.52 (as judged by the autocorrelation criterion) depending on the type of regularization method used

A Fast Algorithm For Sparse Multichannel Blind Deconvolution

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)We have addressed blind deconvolution in a multichannel framework. Recently, a robust solution to this problem based on a Bayesian approach called sparse multichannel blind deconvolution (SMBD) was proposed in the literature with interesting results. However, its computational complexity can be high. We have proposed a fast algorithm based on the minimum entropy deconvolution, which is considerably less expensive. We designed the deconvolution filter to minimize a normalized version of the hybrid l(1)/l(2)-norm loss function. This is in contrast to the SMBD, in which the hybrid l(1)/l(2)-norm function is used as a regularization term to directly determine the deconvolved signal. Results with synthetic data determined that the performance of the obtained deconvolution filter was similar to the one obtained in a supervised framework. Similar results were also obtained in a real marine data set for both techniques.811V7V16CAPESCNPqPetrobrasCoordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq

A model for determining electromechanical response profile of ultrasonic transducers and ultrasonic transient echo

Models for calculating the radiation, scattering and reception of ultrasound are developed to provide a good understanding of the physical essence of ultrasonic testing. The process of ultrasonic wave generating by pulse, propagation in the medium and received by the transducer is analyzed, and the received ultrasonic signal can be found by convolving of the electromechanical response of transducer with the flaw impulse response. A model is proposed to predict the echo response from a defect of complex geometry based on the Huygens' principle of superposition. Spatial impulse response and Kirchhoff approximation are applied to model the interaction of the ultrasonic wave with flaws. The electromechanical response profile of transducer is calculated by deconvolution the echo of plane test block with impulse response of the test block. Characteristics of flaw impulse response of targets on and off-axis are analyzed in detail, the received ultrasonic echo is explained in terms of the plane and edge echoes, however, polarity is opposite. The amplitude of the direct echo is far greater than the edge echo. The theoretically predicted results are in good agreement with the experimentally results. © 2017 Acta Acustica

Signal processing for guided wave structural health monitoring

The importance of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in several industrial fields has been continuously growing in the last few years with the increasing need for the development of systems able to monitor continuously the integrity of complex structures. In order to be competitive with conventional non destructive evaluation techniques, SHM must be able to effectively detect the occurrence of damage in the structure, giving information regarding the damage location. Ultrasonic guided waves offer the possibility of inspecting large areas of structures from a small number of sensor positions. However, inspection of complex structures is difficult as the reflections from different features overlap. Therefore damage detection becomes an extremely challenging problem and robust signal processing is required in order to resolve strongly overlapping echoes. In our work we have considered at first the possibility of employing a deconvolution approach for enhancing the resolution of ultrasonic time traces and the potential and the limitations of this approach for reliable SHM applications have been shown. The effects of noise on the bandwidth of the typical signals in SHM and the effects of frequency dependent phase shifts are the main detrimental issues that strongly reduce the performance of deconvolution in SHM applications. The second part of this thesis is concerned with the evaluation of a subtraction approach for SHM when changes of environmental conditions are taken into account. Temperature changes result in imperfect subtraction even for an undamaged structure, since temperature changes modify the mechanical properties of the material and therefore the velocity of propagation of ultrasonic guided waves. Compensation techniques have previously been used effectively to overcome temperature effects, in order to reduce the residual in the subtraction. In this work the performance of temperature compensation techniques has been evaluated also in the presence of other detrimental effects, such as liquid loading and different temperature responses of materials in adhesive joints. Numerical simulations and experiments have been conducted and it has been shown that temperature compensation techniques can cope in principle with non temperature effects. It is concluded that subtraction approach represents a promising method for reliable Structural Health Monitoring. Nonetheless the feasibility of a subtraction approach for SHM depends on environmental conditions

A sparse reconstruction framework for Fourier-based plane wave imaging

International audienceUltrafast imaging based on plane-wave (PW) insonification is an active area of research due to its capability of reaching high frame rates. Among PW imaging methods, Fourier-based approaches have demonstrated to be competitive compared with traditional delay and sum methods. Motivated by the success of compressed sensing techniques in other Fourier imaging modalities, like magnetic resonance imaging, we propose a new sparse regularization framework to reconstruct high-quality ultrasound (US) images. The framework takes advantage of both the ability to formulate the imaging inverse problem in the Fourier domain and the sparsity of US images in a sparsifying domain. We show, by means of simulations, in vitro and in vivo data, that the proposed framework significantly reduces image artifacts, i.e., measurement noise and sidelobes, compared with classical methods, leading to an increase of the image quality