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Updated: Mar 20, 2026

Author Spotlight: A Stable Phantom Material for Optical and Acoustic Imaging
Published on: June 16, 2023
Comment on "Reconstructing surface wave profiles from reflected acoustic pulses" [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 133(5),
1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0238, USA.
Abstract:
A computationally efficient, time-domain Helmholtz-Kirchhoff (H-K) integral was derived and applied to reconstructing surface wave profiles from reflected acoustic pulses [Walstead and Deane, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 133, 2597-2611 (2013)]. However, the final form of the integral equation incorporating a stationary phase approximation contained a complex phase term exp(iπ/4), which cannot be treated as a simple time delay. In this work, a real time-domain H-K integral is presented that includes an additional Hilbert transform of the time-derivative of the transmitted pulse. Numerical simulation with a sinusoidal surface shows good agreement between the real time-domain formulation and exact H-K integral, while achieving a significant improvement in computational speed (e.g., 2 orders of magnitude).
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