Acoustic imaging of objects buried in soil

In this study, we demonstrate an acoustic system for high-resolution imagin g of objects buried in soil. Our goal is to image cultural artifacts in ord er to assess in a rapid manner the historical significance of a potential c onstruction site. We describe the imaging system and present preliminary im ages produced from data collected from a soil phantom. A mathematical model and associated computer software are developed in order to simulate the si gnals acquired by the system. We have built the imaging system, which incor porates a single element source transducer and a receiver array. The source and receiver array are moved together along a linear path to collect data. Using this system, we have obtained B-mode images of several targets by us ing delay-and-sum beamforming, and we have also applied synthetic aperture theory to this problem. (C) 2000 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966 (00)00207-1].