Synthesis of extreme sparse array for real-time 3D acoustic imaging

An optimised synthesis method for designing an extreme sparse array with the minimum set of elements is proposed. The method is based on a cross-array configuration and a multi-frequency beamforming algorithm. The experimental results show that the extreme sparse array achieves a 98.9% element thinning compared with the fully sampled planar array and the generated beam pattern satisfies the presupposed constraints. This is much better than the results obtained in the previous literature.