Quantization bit rate reduction in scanning tomographic acoustic microscopy

The imaging capability of the scanning laser acoustic microscope has been enhanced by the addition of a quadrature detector for holographic imaging and rotational and frequency-varying hardware for tomographic reconstruction. Because of the expansion of data acquisition capability, the memory-intensive demands placed on the professing computer by these modifications require efficient methods of representing and storing the tomographic data while retaining the quality of image reconstruction. This paper reports the performance evaluation of low bit-rate data acquisition. Results show the feasibility of high-quality imaging at bit-rate savings at the level of 33%.