Abstract: There is provided a method for sensing a sample. The method includes the following steps: first a light beam is directed onto the sample. The sample transmits at least a portion of the light beam to form a transmitted light beam. Next, the transmitted light beam is received at an acoustic transducer. The acoustic transducer absorbs at least a portion of the transmitted light beam and in response generated an acoustic wave. Subsequently, an electrical signal is generated at the acoustic transducer. The electrical signal is generated based on at least a portion of the acoustic wave.

Abstract: The invention generally relates to the field of synthetic aperture imaging. In particular, the invention relates to systems and methods for generating synthetic transmit aperture (“STA”) signals and processing synthetic aperture imaging (“SAI”) signals for improved signal-to-noise ratio (“SNR”) and spatial resolution. This generally relates to a method to improve the signal-noise-ratio (SNR) of array signals by both encoding the transmission from multiple array elements with waveform modifications and time delays and encoding the receivers into output channels and decoding the measured signals at the selected output channels to estimate the equivalent received signals of a receiver as if only one transmitting element were fired individually in each transmission event. SAI techniques are subsequently applied to the equivalent SAI signals to obtain improved images.