Secondary Interface Echoes Suppression for Immersion Ultrasonic Imaging Based on Phase Circular Statistics Vector.

Immersion ultrasonic phased array imaging technology offers great advantages, particularly in coupling and automatic detection of industrial non-destructive testing (NDT). To suppress the influence of secondary interface echoes in the immersion ultrasonic phased array imaging, a novel phase circular statistics vector (PCSV) weighting method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the PCSV factor matrix is established according to the phase consistency of the echo signals. Secondly, due to the higher phase coherence of the defect echo, the PCSV factor matrix is used to weight the TFM image to suppress the secondary interface echo. The result shows the secondary interface echoes are effectively suppressed in the total focusing method (TFM) image on a 0~40 dB scale. It is also shown that PCSV weighting could not only suppress the secondary interface echoes but also improved the image quality in terms of SNR and lateral resolution by comparing with traditional TFM.