Real-time 3D imaging using 2D curved array

A real-time volumetric imaging system using a curved 2-D array is presented, in which a small subaperture moves across the array surface to scan a volume of interest. The 2-D curved array designed for this purpose consists of 90×46 elements with an element pith of 1.5 λ and has the same view angles along both lateral and elevation directions as those of a commercial mechanical 1-D array for 3-D imaging. To obtain a required image quality with a small number of active channels, the four corners of the transmit and receive subapertures are tapered. In addition, the receive subaperture consists of sparsely distributed elements, and fold-over array scheme is adopted in transmit. Computer simulation results show that by using all these methods combined, the image resolution of a fully sampled 64×32 subaperture can be obtained using only 256 channels in both transmit and receive with slightly degraded resolution, which is much superior to that of 3-D imaging with a mechanical 1-D array.