The BIAS project aims to utilise, through an increased understanding, the signals used by bats and dolphins. This will enable new acoustic technologies to be developed that will:

• Lead to much greater resolution and imaging
• Allow enhanced physical characterisation of materials, processes and structures

A number of key objectives will need to be met to enable the development of new acoustic technologies. These can be summarised as follows:

• To develop, from an engineering viewpoint, an understanding of the relationship between the signals employed by bats and dolphins to the task that the signals were emitted to resolve
• To produce a library of signals derived from bats, dolphins and experimental tests
• To minimise peak power needed to improve resolution and physical characterisation in acoustic systems
• To develop advanced signal processing techniques using the same signals as bats and dolphins use to solve similar problems
• To improve axial, spatial and contrast resolution in acoustic imaging systems
• To improve signal to noise ratio to enhance image contrast
• To improve sensitivity and image performance of Doppler methods
• To provide a series of experimental test facilities to act as on-going demonstrators of the benefits of the new technologies to potential users and knowledge transfer candidates
• To create a series of new transducers and arrays that will meet the applications specification
• To investigate the use of pseudorandom, swept frequency and pulse inversion processing schemes for enhanced extraction of data in non-destructive evaluation using the new transducer technology