A new software implementation of ultrasonic phased array inspection and 3D imaging application based on GPU parallel computing

As ultrasonic phased array technology develops, the sample frequency of the ultrasonic signal gets higher and the number of independent channel increases at the same time. The huge amount of data need to be processed with algorithms such as beam forming, FFT, FIR, and more complex algorithm in the field of machine learning. Then the result is need to be displayed in a computer screen. One way to accomplish the data process system is to use the digital circuit gate-level parallel logic in FPGA to realize simple algorithms, and CPU to realize more complex algorithms. However, this kind of system has defects such as complicated hardware, low commonality, limited calculation ability in CPU. Therefore, a new kind of software system based on CUDA/OpenGL is designed, which needs simpler hardware as well as lower cost, and has more flexibility in use relative to the traditional system. Without any auxiliary hardware, tests show that the software system can present much higher efficiency in ultrasonic data process over the traditional way.