Evaluation of Synthetic Transmit Aperture 3D Acoustic Imaging Using 2D Transmitter Array

The paper describes a 3D acoustic imaging system that uses a 2D receiver array and a 2D transmitter array. For many years, high quality acoustic imaging has been achieved by using synthetic transmit aperture (STA) technique [1][2]. Normally, STA uses an array of receivers and a small number of transmitters to produce an image. However, the conventional arrangement of transmitters in a same horizontal plane or linear array does not provide good signal strength all over scanned target space since directivity of transmitted signals are limited to some particular directions, i.e. directions along the plane of transmitters. As a result, transmitted signals are strong along the plane of transmitters but weak in upper and lower space so it is not suitable for creating 3D images.