Back-propagation and correlation imaging using phase-space gaussian-beams processing

We present a beam-based imaging scheme for targets in homogeneous medium whereby the fields of the source and receiver arrays are expanded using special phase-space bases of collimated beam fields, thus converting the physical data into a beam-domain data describing the scattering amplitudes seen (synthetically) by the receiver beams due to excitation by the source beams. The image is then formed by correlating the backpropagated beam data with the incident beams. The formulation utilizes the ultra-wideband phase-space beam-summation method where the beam bases consist of Gaussian beams that emerge from a discrete set of points and directions in the source and the receiver domains. An important feature of this method is that the beam-sets are frequency independent and hence are calculated once and then used for all frequencies. A closed form expression for the data-transformation matrix from the physical domain to the beam domain is derived, leading to sparse beam-domain data. The beam approach enables local imaging of any sub-domain of interest by retaining only the subset of source and receiver beams that pass through that domain, thus reducing the overall computation complexity. The method properties are explored via numerical simulations in a noisy environment.