Synthetic phased array image formation and restoration

A coherent array imaging method is described that uses small groups of adjacent array elements called subarrays. For each firing event, only one subarray is used for transmit and receive, and all elements of the subarray transmit and receive in parallel. Phased array processing is used to focus and steer the subarray beam in transmit and receive. A sufficient number of beams are acquired such that the Nyquist sampling criteria is met for the subarray. The beams acquired from each subarray are upsampled, filtered, and combined with beams from all the other subarrays to form the final high-resolution image. A subarray-dependent reconstruction and restoration filter is applied to the subarray beams. The method significantly reduces the front-end hardware complexity compared to full phased array imaging. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.