Patent ID: 8400876

Claim:
A method for sensing a scene, comprising the steps of: transmitting pulses into the scene by an array of transducers, wherein each pulse has a wideband ultrasound frequency, wherein the pulses are transmitted simultaneously, and wherein a pattern of the wideband ultrasound frequencies in each pulse is unique with respect to the patterns of each other pulse; receiving the pulses by each transducer as received pulses when the pulse are reflected by the scene; sampling and decomposing each received pulse using a Fourier transform to produce a vector of frequency coefficients; partitioning a representation of the scene into voxels, wherein a reflectivity of each voxel is to be determined; stacking the reflectivities to be determined to form a vector of the reflectivities to be determined; forming a linear system, wherein the linear system models the vector of frequency coefficients given the vector of the reflectivities, wherein the transmitted pulses are represented as a multiplication of a transmission operator by the vector of the reflectivities to be determined; and applying a sparse recovery method to the linear system to determine the reflectivity of the scene.