Reduction of transducer reverberations by transducer movement-determination of the optimal transducer displacement

Reverberations from reflections at the transducer surface are overlaid on first order echoes from deeper targets and sometimes obscure these heavily. A method to reduce this artifact consists of acquiring two scan lines in the same direction with the transducer displaced slightly. The signal of the second scan line is shifted back by twice the displacement and subtracted from the first scan line. The paper shows that the optimal displacement is dependent on the transducer center frequency. In addition other critical parameters i.e. the processing sampling rate and the displacement estimate accuracy are examined in simulations and experiments. The results show that with an appropriate choice of the parameters it is possible to reduce reverberations by 15-20 dB