Abstract

In this paper, a bat-inspired high-resolution ultrasound 3D imaging system is presented. Live bats demonstrate that the properly used ultrasound can be used to perceive 3D space. With this in mind, a neural network referred to as a Bat-G network is implemented to reconstruct the 3D representation of target objects from the hyperbolic FM (HFM) chirped ultrasonic echoes. The Bat-G network consists of an encoder emulating a bat's central auditory pathway, and a 3D graphical visualization decoder. For the acquisition of the ultrasound data, a custom-made Bat-I sensor module is used. The Bat-G network shows the uniform 3D reconstruction results and achieves precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.896, 0.899, and 0.895, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate the implementation feasibility of a high-resolution non-optical sound-based imaging system being used by live bats. The project web page (https://sites.google.com/view/batgnet) contains additional content summarizing our research.