Deconvolution of ultrasonic signals in time domain

Deconvolution can be used to separate overlapping echoes from very thin layers. This way the reflection parameters of each particular echo can be obtained. Here, a noise insensitive time-domain deconvolution algorithm is presented, which can handle arbitrary and time-of-arrival dependent reference pulse shapes. This can reduce artifacts and enable proper detection of echoes with small amplitude, even if echoes have a non-uniform shape like real echoes do. In contrast to common deconvolution approaches it does not assume Gaussian pulse shapes or the same reference shape for all reflections. The deconvolution results have a very high quality with artifacts in the lower 1% range. Pulses are separated at arrival time differences above half a wave-period. The high precision of the reflection parameter determination enables much better analysis quality also for applications with no superposition of reflections.