Nonlinear Beamforming Based on Amplitude Coherence Applied to Ultrasonic Imaging of Coarse-Grained Steels

This paper deals with ultrasonic imaging in a nondestructive evaluation (NDE) context. In particular, we are focused on the inspection of coarse-grained steels having an heterogeneous composition that creates structural noise in the ultrasonic signals and images. The standard way to beamform the acquired ultrasonic data is by delay-and-sum (DAS). This method is fast but suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for coarse-grained steel inspection. In this paper, we propose to adapt a coherence-based beamformer called pDAS from the medical imaging community. pDAS beamforming is based on DAS structure but includes p-root and p-power before and after summations, respectively. It results in an enhancement of the coherent summation of signals that improves both resolution and contrast. Coherence-based beamformers are known to enhance information whose acoustic response correlates with geometrical information, that is why they decrease grating lobes and side lobes, specular echoes, reconstruction artifacts and noise due to multiple scattering. In this paper, the pDAS beamformer is proposed for two common acquisition schemes employed in NDE that are plane wave imaging (PWI) and full matrix capture (FMC). The beamformers have been efficiently implemented for parallel computing on graphics processing unit (GPU) in a context of real-time imaging and fast part scanning in NDE. First, experimental results are presented from an austenitic-ferritic sample from the power generation industry that contains side drilled holes (SDH) with diameter 0.4mm at several depths. pDAS (for p from 2 to 5) shows improvements in terms of SNR and resolution compared to standard DAS, both in PWI and FMC modalities. We also show that the computation cost of pDAS is equivalent to DAS. A real application on a sample containing a fatigue crack connected to the backwall is exposed. We show that pDAS beamformer can enhance crack response compared to grains, but it also decreases unwanted information such as backwall specular echoes and reconstruction artifacts.