Real-time 3D Imaging using 2-D 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 90x46 elements with an element pith of 1.5lambda 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 64x32 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.