Range sidelobe artifacts which are associated with pulse compression methods can be reduced with a new method composed of Pulse Elongation and Deconvolution (PED). Both approaches yield similar signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements. The deconvolution is implemented as a stabilized inverse filter. The excitation wave form is optimized in a minimum mean square error (MMSE) sense. An analytical expression for the power spectrum of the optimal pulse is presented and several techniques to numerically optimize the excitation pulse are shown. The effects of PED are demonstrated in computer simulations as well as ultrasonic images.
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