Compressive Sensing for over-the-air ultrasound

The advent of Compressive Sensing has provided significant mathematical tools to enhance the sensing capabilities of hardware devices. In this paper we apply Compressive Sensing to improve over-the-air ultrasonic sensing capabilities. We demonstrate that using an appropriate scene model it is possible to pose three-dimensional surface reconstruction of a scene as a sparse recovery problem. By transmitting incoherent wideband ultrasonic pulses and receiving their reflections a sensor array can sense the scene and reconstruct it using standard CS reconstruction algorithms. We further demonstrate that it possible to construct virtual arrays that exploit the sensors´ motion. Thus we can obtain three-dimensional scene reconstruction using a linear mobile array.