# The effect of hardware-computed travel-time on localization accuracy in the inversion of experimental (acoustic) waveform data

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how hardware-based travel-time computation methods affect the accuracy and robustness of waveform data inversion in acoustic tomography, especially under noisy and incomplete measurements.

## Contribution

It introduces hardware-level implementations for integrated and thresholded travel-time computation and compares their effects on inversion robustness using experimental data.

## Key findings

- ITT improves robustness with noisy data
- Hardware preprocessing affects inversion accuracy
- Thresholded approach enhances stability

## Abstract

This study aims to advance hardware-level computations for travel-time tomography applications in which the wavelength is close to the diameter of the information that has to be recovered. Such can be the case, for example, in the imaging applications of (1) biomedical physics, (2) astro-geophysics and (3) civil engineering. Our aim is to shed light on the effect of that preprocessing the digital waveform signal has on the inversion results and to find computational solutions that guarantee robust inversion when there are incomplete and/or noisy measurements. We describe a hardware-level implementation for integrated and thresholded travel-time computation (ITT and TTT). We compare the ITT and TTT approaches in inversion analysis with experimental acoustic travel-time data recorded using a ring geometry for the transmission and measurement points. The results obtained suggest that ITT is essential for maintaining the robustness of the inversion with imperfect signal digitization and sparsity. In order to ensure the relevance of the results, the specifications of the test setup were related to those of applications (1)-(3).