One-shot beam-forming with adaptively weighted compound of multiple transmission angles and subbands

Abstract

We previously proposed a beamformer that adaptively compounds echoes for different subbands and transmission angles. This methodology requires the transmission and reception of multiple plane waves. Thus, in the present study, we examine a method that approximates the previous method with one transmission and reception. We assign different subbands to each transmission direction angle and simultaneously transmit one shot as a chirp signal; hence, echoes for all subbands can be received simultaneously. Then, through pulse compression, the received echo is separated into each subband, and we apply our previously proposed compound procedure to achieve imaging using one-shot beamforming. The evaluation of the method performance was conducted by finite element simulation. The results show that the obtained image is almost the same resolution as the original beamformer, but with a worse contrast. The cause and solution of the contrast deterioration are also reported in this paper.