Ultrasonic non destructive testing based on sparse deconvolution

Abstract

The acoustic modality yields non destructive testing techniques of choice for in-depth investigation. Given a precise model of acoustic wave propagation in materials of possibly complex structures, acoustical imaging amounts to the so-called acoustic wave inversion. A less ambitious approach consists in processing pulse-echo data (typically, A- or B-scans) to detect localised echoes with the maximum temporal (and lateral) precision. This is a resolution enhancement problem, and more precisely a sparse deconvolution problem which is naturally addressed in the inversion framework. The paper focuses on the main sparse deconvolution methods and algorithms, with a view to apply them to ultrasonic non-destructive testing.