Ultrasonic Flaw Imaging via Multipath Exploitation

We consider ultrasonic imaging for the visualization of flaws in a material. Ultrasonic imaging is a powerful nondestructive testing (NDT) tool which assesses material conditions via the detection, localization, and classification of flaws inside a structure. We utilize reflections of ultrasonic signals which occur when encountering different media and interior boundaries. These reflections can be cast as direct paths to the target corresponding to the virtual sensors appearing on the top and bottom side of the target. Some of these virtual sensors constitute a virtual aperture, whereas in others, the aperture changes with the transmitter position. Exploitations of multipath extended virtual array apertures provide enhanced imaging capability beyond the limitation of traditional multisensor approaches. The waveforms observed at the physical as well as the virtual sensors yield additional measurements corresponding to different aspect angles, thus allowing proper multiview imaging of flaws. We derive the wideband point spread functions for dominant multipaths and show that fusion of physical and virtual sensor data improves the flaw perimeter detection and localization performance. The effectiveness of the proposed multipath exploitation approach is demonstrated using real data