Estimação conjunta de atraso de tempo subamostral e eco de referência para sinais de ultrassom

Abstract

Abstract (parágrafo único): In non-destructive testing (NDT) with ultrasound, the signal obtained from a real data acquisition system may be contaminated by noise and the echoes may have sub-sample time delays. In some cases, these aspects may compromise the information obtained from a signal by an acquisition system. To deal with these situations, Time Delay Estimation (TDE) techniques and signal reconstruction techniques can be used to perform approximations and also to obtain more information about the data set. TDE techniques can be used for a number of purposes in the defectoscopy, for example, for accurate location of defects in parts, monitoring the corrosion rate in pieces, measuring the thickness of a given material, and so on. Data reconstruction methods have a wide range of applications, such as NDT, medical imaging, telecommunications and so on. In general, most time delay estimation techniques require a high precision signal model, otherwise the location of this estimate may have reduced quality. In this work, an alternative scheme is proposed that jointly estimates an echo model and time delays for several echoes from noisy measurements. In addition, by reinterpreting the utilized techniques from a probabilistic perspective, its functionalities are extended through a joint application of a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator. Finally, through simulations, results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over conventional methods.