Statistical beamformer for Synthetic Aperture imaging based on Rician distribution

In ultrasonic NDT applications, where the reflections produced by structural elements or defects are high, reflections and diffraction cause artifacts in the images that can make the interpretation of the results very complex. Although the conventional beamformer, based on Delay-and-Sum, provides a robust measure of reflectivity, the quality that it is able to generate in the image is limited. In this work, in order to determine a more accurate value of the reflectivity, an alternative statistical approach has been considered. Based on the concept of sparse array, it is possible to obtain an estimate set representative of this reflectivity from the mean-values obtained of different partial configurations of the coarray.