This paper presents and evaluates a new acoustic imaging system that uses multicarrier signals for correlation division in synthetic transmit aperture (CD-STA). CD-STA is a method that transmits uncorrelated signals from different transducers simultaneously to achieve high-speed and high-resolution acoustic imaging. In CD-STA, autocorrelations and cross-correlations in transmitted signals must be suppressed because they cause artifacts in the resulting images, which narrow the dynamic range as a consequence. To suppress the correlation noise, we had proposed to use multicarrier signals optimized by a genetic algorithm. Because the evaluation of our proposed method was very limited in the previous reports, we analyzed it more deeply in this paper. We optimized three pairs of multicarrier waveforms of various lengths, which correspond to 5th-, 6th- and 7th-order M-sequence signals, respectively. We built a CD-STA imaging system that operates in air. Using the system, we conducted imaging experiments to evaluate the image quality and resolution of the multicarrier signals. We also investigated the ability of the proposed method to resolve both positions and velocities of target scatterers. For that purpose, we carried out an experiment, in which both moving and fixed targets were visualized by our system. As a result of the experiments, we confirmed that the multicarrier signals have lower artifact levels, better axial resolution, and greater tolerance to velocity mismatch than M-sequence signals, particularly for short signals.

In this paper, we discuss on the realization of reduced peak power transmission for the multicarrier systems. Since the signals have large amplitude fluctuations in conventional multicarrier systems, signals amplified by a nonlinear amplifier are greatly distorted, resulting in severe performance degradation. In order to avoid this large amplitude fluctuation, we propose a scheme for reducing the nonlinear distortion by using the set of the signal point series which show low peak to mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR) value. In this system, one symbol is transmitted with multicarriers and the received signal is detected with maximum likelihood sequence detection.