Adaptive 3D ultrasonic data compression using distributed processing engines

Ultrasonic 3D imaging is an important tool in NDE applications for quality control, flaw detection, and material characterization. However, ultrasonic 3D images often encompass immense amounts of data, making it very challenging for volumetric image analysis, transmission and storage. In this study, a fast and scalable data compression System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed. This compression SoC can process A-Scan, B-Scan and C-Scan signals and images in real-time and reduce the data and bandwidth requirements substantially without degrading the signal fidelity. A volumetric image of 128x128x2048 samples is compressed by 96.9% in less than one second by the proposed compression system implemented on a Virtex-5 FPGA.