  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).
