A system and method for providing assistive listening for a plurality of listeners in an environment including a plurality of acoustic sources. A microphone array in combination with an acoustic beamforming processor configured to receive the acoustic signals within the environment and to process the acoustic signals based upon a target location of an acoustic signal selected on a listener-controlled interface device to generate a steered beam pattern. The acoustic beamforming processor further configured to transmit the steered beam pattern to the listener-controlled interface device based on the target location selected. The listener-controlled interface device configured to provide the steered beam pattern to an ear-level transducer of a hearing-impaired listener.

Exemplary aspects are directed to a radar-based detection circuit or system with signal reception circuitry to receive reflection signals in response to radar signals transmitted towards objects. The system may include logic/computer circuitry and a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) virtual array to enhance resolution or remove ambiguities otherwise present in processed reflection signals. The MIMO array may include sparse linear arrays, each being associated with a unique antenna-element spacing from among a set of unique co-prime antenna-element spacings.

An image generation apparatus including a computation processing section that generates an ultrasonic image from a received signal associated with each scanning of an object in which an ultrasonic wave is transmitted and received is provided. The computation processing section sets, for each scanning, a selection range over which the received signal is received and which includes the direction of the scanning, calculates weights used in a beamforming process based on the received signals within the selection range, and carries out the beamforming process based on the weights to generate an image associated with the scanning.

Provided is an object information acquiring apparatus including elements with which an acoustic wave is transmitted to and received from an object and converted into a plurality of received signals, a processor that acquires a power intensity signal of the inside of the object, and a corrector that corrects the power intensity signal, the processor being configured to calculate correlation values of frequency components, perform frequency average processing on a correlation matrix that is a set of the plurality of calculated correlation values to acquire a first power intensity signal, and reduce variance of elements in the diagonal direction of the correlation matrix to acquire a second power intensity signal, and the corrector being configured to output a power intensity signal subjected to correction processing.

Systems and methods are disclosed for performing ultrasound imaging. Channel domain data can be received from an ultrasound transducer to form one or more channel domain data sets. A first ultrasound processing operation can be applied to the channel domain data to generate a first subset of one or more images from the one or more channel domain data sets. A second ultrasound processing operation can be applied to the channel domain data to generate a second subset of one or more images from the one or more channel domain data sets. Image characteristics of the first subset of one or more images and the second subset of one or more images can be regionally analyzed to identify regional image characteristics of the first and second subsets of one or more images. The first subset of one or more images can be blended with the second subset of one or more images based on the regional image characteristics to generate one or more composite images.

An ultrasonic imaging device includes an ultrasonic generating unit and an ultrasonic imaging processing unit. The ultrasonic generating unit repeatedly turns on N of M ultrasonic array elements of the ultrasonic probe multiple times as a group of array elements for linear scanning, and each scan is to emit an ultrasonic signal by each group of array elements and receive an echo signal of the ultrasonic signal. The ultrasonic imaging processing unit extracts a central echo signal from the echo signal in each scan to form a channel signal, and according to the arrival time of the echo signals, each central echo signal in the channel signal is delayed and summed to generate a modified channel signal. The modified channel signal is subjected to image synthesis process to obtain an ultrasonic image.

A handheld ultrasound device may comprise components configured to provide decreased size, weight, complexity, and power consumption. The handheld ultrasound device may comprise a beamformer configured to implement and compress a flag table in place of a delay table. These improvements can decrease the amount of memory used to generate ultrasound images, which can decrease the size, weight, and power consumption of the handheld ultrasound device. Ultrasound image data on a handheld imaging probe can be compressed on the handheld imaging probe prior to transmission from the probe in order to decrease the amount of data transmitted from the probe. The compressed data may comprise compressed pixels to maintain spatial image resolution. The compression circuitry may comprise an amount of memory related to a dynamic range of the compressed data that is independent of the dynamic range of the input data, which can decrease memory, power consumption, and latencies.

A measurement and imaging instrument capable of beamforming with high speed and high accuracy without approximate calculation. The instrument includes a reception unit which receives a wave arriving from a measurement object to generate a reception signal; and an instrument main body which performs a lateral modulation while superposing two waves in a two-dimensional case and three or four waves in a three-dimensional case in beamforming processing of the reception signal in which at least one wave arriving from the measurement object is processed as being transmitted or received in the axial direction or directions symmetric with respect to the axial direction to generate a multi-dimensional reception signal, performs Hilbert transform with respect to the multi-dimensional reception signal, and performs partial derivative processing or one-dimensional Fourier transform to generate analytic signals of the multi-dimensional reception signals of the two waves or the three or four waves.

The present invention provides a pulsed Doppler ultra-high spectral resolution imaging processing method and processing system. The method includes: acquiring IQ signals corresponding to N sampling points respectively on each scan line; in a fast time direction, performing wall filtering processing to form an IQ signal wall filtering sequence; performing FFT on each sampling point in the IQ signal wall filtering sequence in a slow and a fast time direction, respectively, to obtain an energy distribution matrix at different frequency shifts; acquiring a velocity distribution matrix; and retrieving a velocity sequence for display, querying the velocity distribution matrix and the energy distribution matrix according to the velocity sequence, and acquiring an energy sequence corresponding to the velocity sequence for displaying a final spectrum. When a transmit signal bandwidth is wider or a scatterer velocity is faster, the velocity resolution is greatly guaranteed.

The invention relates to a method for adaptive beamforming of ultrasound signals, the method comprising the steps of (a) Receiving time-aligned RF signals acquired by multiple ultrasound transducer elements in response to an ultrasound transmission; (b) Determining content-adaptive apodization weights for beamforming the time-aligned RF signals by applying a trained artificial neural network (16) to the time-aligned RF signals; and (c) Applying the content-adaptive apodization weights to the time-aligned RF signals to calculate a beamformed output signal. The invention also relates to a method for training an artificial neural network (16) useful in adaptive beamforming of ultrasound signals, and a related computer program and system.