DSP seminar

DATE: Tuesday, Apr 21
TIME: 4 p.m.
LOCATION: Beckman Room 5602

Title   :   Acoustic Imaging of Objects Buried in Soil
Speaker :   Nail \c{C}adall{\i}

Work by :   Nail \c{C}adall{\i},  
	    Catherine H. Frazier,
	    David C. Munson, Jr., 
	    William D. O'Brien, Jr.

In this study, we propose an acoustic system for high-resolution
imaging of objects buried in soil. Our application of interest 
is to detect and image cultural artifacts, which requires much 
finer resolution than is currently available.

We have designed an acoustic imaging system for subsurface imaging
that incorporates a rectangular transducer array of receivers 
and a transmitter. We have also developed a mathematical model and 
associated computer software to simulate the signals acquired by 
the above system. 

By moving the receiver array across the surface of the
medium, it is possible to obtain sufficient data 
to form an image of the soil subsurface. At each position, a single
beam can be formed by focusing the array broadside, so that a 
conventional B-mode image may be formed. Given N transducers, 
a linear receiver array could provide far higher resolution than 
a rectangular array if synthetic aperture processing were used.
We have simulated a SAR-type reconstruction for the 
acoustic imaging scenario, using a modification of the
correlation algorithm which was proposed earlier for 
the synthetic aperture radar imaging. Currently, we are developing 
our image reconstruction algorithms to exercise them on real data
collected from the system at CERL.