Noise Filtering in the Synthetic Transmit Aperture Imaging by Decomposition of the Time Reversal Operator: Application to Flaw Detection in Coarse-grained Stainless Steels

Abstract In the present work, the Synthetic Transmit Aperture (STA) imaging is applied on coarse grained steels using a contact phased-array probe. In order to reduce the noise introduced by the heterogeneous structure, as well as artifacts due to surface guided waves, the Decomposition of the Time Reversal Operator method is performed before calculating STA images.