Improvement of the lateral resolution of finite-size hydrophones by deconvolution

In various fields of ultrasound applications, frequencies well above 10 MHz are used. As a consequence of this, ultrasound sensors, especially the piezoelectric hydrophones presently available which are used for the characterization of the respective fields, can no longer be considered as point receivers. By means of numerical deconvolution, the adverse averaging effect caused by the finite sensor size can be revoked. The efficiency of the deconvolution process is dealt with for both numerical simulations and experimental investigations. Best results were obtained using a reconstruction filter consisting of a combination of a Wiener filter, a pruning filter and an additional low-pass filter.