High-resolution pressure imaging via background-oriented schlieren tomography: A spatiotemporal measurement for MHz ultrasound fields and hydrophone calibration

In this work, the spatiotemporal pressure field of MHz-focused ultrasound is measured using a background-oriented schlieren technique combined with fast checkerboard demodulation and vector tomography (VT-BOS). Hydrophones have been commonly employed to directly measure the local pressure in underwater ultrasound. However, their limitations include that they disturb the acoustic field and affect the measured pressure through the spatial averaging effect. To overcome such limitations, we propose VT-BOS as a non-contact technique for acoustic field measurements using only a background image and a camera. In our experiments, VT-BOS measures focused acoustic fields with a focal width of 1.0 mm and a frequency of 4.55 MHz, capturing traveling, reflected, and standing waves. We discuss three key features of this approach: (1) the temporal evolution of pressure measured by VT-BOS and hydrophones, (2) the differences in computational cost and spatial resolution between VT-BOS and other techniques, and (3) the measurement range of VT-BOS. The results demonstrate that VT-BOS successfully quantifies spatiotemporal acoustic fields and can estimate the hydrophones’ spatial averaging effect over a finite area. VT-BOS measures pressure fields of several MPa with high spatiotemporal resolution, requiring less computational and measurement time. It is used to measure pressure amplitudes from 0.4 to 6.4 MPa, with the potential to extend the range to 0.3–201.6 MPa by adjusting the background-to-target distance. VT-BOS is a promising tool for measuring acoustic pressure in the MHz and MPa ranges, critical for applications such as vessel flow measurement and hydrophone calibration.