Ultrasonic imaging using conditional generative adversarial networks

The Full Matrix Capture (FMC) and Total Focusing Method (TFM) combination is often considered the gold standard in ultrasonic nondestructive testing, however it may be impractical due to the amount of time required to gather and process the FMC, particularly for high cadence inspections. This study proposes replacing conventional FMC acquisition and TFM processing with a single zero-degree plane wave (PW) insonification and a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) trained to produce TFM-like images. Three models with different cGAN architectures and loss formulations were tested in different scenarios. Their performances were compared with conventional TFM computed from FMC. The proposed cGANs were able to recreate TFM-like images with the same resolution while improving the contrast in more than 94% of the reconstructions in comparison with conventional TFM reconstructions. Indeed, thanks to the use of a bias in the cGANs' training, the contrast was systematically increased through a reduction of the background noise level and the elimination of some artifacts. Finally, the proposed method led to a reduction of the computation time and file size by a factor of 120 and 75, respectively.