Acoustics Australia https://doi.org/10.1007/s40857-020-00190-6 ORIGINAL PAPER Compensation Techniques for Artifacts Arising Due to Non-ideal Components in Acoustic Reflectometry System Kapil Dev Tyagi 1 · Arun Kumar 2 · Rajendar Bahl 2 Received: 2 January 2020 / Accepted: 22 May 2020 © Australian Acoustical Society 2020 Abstract One of the applications of the acoustic reflectometry technique is to study the layered media structures such as soil, snow. The issues of acoustic reflectometry system to study the layered media structures related with using non-ideal components are given in this paper. It has been demonstrated that there are several artifacts present in the acoustic reflectometry analysis in practice. The paper presents the signal processing algorithms to compensate the effects of non-ideal components of an acoustic reflectometry system. We have developed the signal processing techniques using inverse filtering to compensate for the artifacts due to the non-ideal nature of the transmit–receive chain. The effectiveness of the inverse filter to compensate the artifacts is also tested. The application of the acoustic reflectometry system after artifacts compensation to study the layered structures has been demonstrated using experiments conducted in a full anechoic room. Keywords Acoustic reflectometry · Inverse filter · Layered structures 1 Introduction Acoustic reflectometry is a noninvasive technique to study and probe layered media such as soil, snow. [1–4]. In acous- tic reflectometry, a loudspeaker is used to transmit acoustic signals and the reflected signals from the structure under test are recorded and analyzed. Different types of test signals can be used in acoustic reflectometry to study the reflections such as an impulse, impulse train, linear chirp, hyperbolic chirp, white noise. Their unique characteristics can help in the anal- ysis process. The selection of a particular signal depends on the specific application. In this paper, we are concerned with the design of signal processing techniques for the linear chirp signal used as the probe signal for acoustic reflectometry for the field and laboratory experiments. A two-layer structure is constructed using foam and air medium in the laboratory. Detection of the reflected signals from the structure using signal processing compensation for system generated arti- facts at the receiver is demonstrated. Researchers [4] have developed the acoustic reflectometry hardware for snow layer B Kapil Dev Tyagi kapiltyagiitd@gmail.com 1 Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, UP, India 2 Centre for Applied Research in Electronics, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Delhi, India detection. But the system related issues have not been dis- cussed, which lead to wrong layer detection. The effect of temperature variation on acoustic reflectometry system per- formance is also discussed in this paper. Similar setup has also been used for the other applications like measurement of acoustical properties of snow [5]. A well-calibrated sys- tem for such measurements based on the proposed technique will give less erroneous results. The next section describes the experimental setup of an acoustic reflectometry system for laboratory and field exper- iments. Also, the signal processing algorithms to analyze the received signal are discussed. In Sect. 3 the issues associated with the non-ideal components and the compensation tech- niques are discussed. In Sect. 4, it has been demonstrated with the help of laboratory experiments that using the proposed compensation techniques the acoustic reflections from the media interfaces can be detected reliably. The final section contains the conclusions of the paper. 123