Compressive sensing for direct time of flight estimation in ultrasound-based NDT

Fuentes, R. and Worden, K. and Antoniadou, I. and Mineo, C. and Pierce, S.G. and Cross, E.J. (2017) Compressive sensing for direct time of flight estimation in ultrasound-based NDT. In: 11th International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring, 2017-09-12 - 2017-09-14.

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach for estimation of ultrasonic time-of-flight (TOF) within a Non Destructive Testing (NDT) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) context. The presented method leverages recent advances in the field of Compressive Sensing (CS), which makes use of sparsity in a transform domain of a signal in order to reduce the number of samples required to store it. For this, the ultrasound signals are considered to be sparse in their autocorrelation domain and a method is suggested for building suitable basis functions, based on Hankel matrices, which transform a signal into its autocorrelation domain. It is shown how this can be combined with standard CS techniques in order to achieve very low error in TOF estimates with up to one-tenth of the original ultrasound samples.