Research on Ultrasonic Phased Array Imaging Based on Information Fusion and GPU Technologies

Abstract

It is a big challenge to get complete accurate information as well as deal with huge amount of signal information when an ultrasonic phased array (UPA) instrument is used to test aircraft components. To solve this problem, a method that combined information fusion technology with Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) is presented in this paper. At first, the information fusion algorithm is introduced. Then, a hardware platform based on GPU is established and is used to carry out various calculations of the algorithm because GPU has a lot of parallel processes. Finally, UPA signals are simulated, which are processed by the proposed information fusion algorithm on the GPU platform. The experiment results suggest that information fusion algorithm can get more complete information characteristics from the echo signals wheareas GPU can improve data processing speed. Therefore, the information fusion technology combined with GPU can improve utilization of UPA signals and give more accurate and reliable description to the reality testing environment, which provide a solution to the challenge mentioned above. Keywordsultrasonic phased array ; nondestructive testing; Graphic Processing Unit; Information Fusion; signal