**Abstract**

Laser-generated ultrasound represents an interesting nondestructive testing technique that is being investigated in the last years as performative alternative to classical ultrasonic-based approaches. The greatest difficulty in analyzing the acoustic emission response is that an in-depth knowledge of how acoustic waves propagate through the tested composite is required. In this regard, different signal processing approaches are being applied in order to assess the significance of features extracted from the resulting analysis. In this study, the detection capabilities of internal defects in a metallic sample are proposed to be studied by means of the time-frequency analysis of the ultrasonic waves resulting from laser-induced thermal mechanism. In the proposed study, the use of the wavelet transform considering different wavelet variants is considered due to its multi-resolution time-frequency characteristics. Also, a significant time-frequency technique widely applied in other fields of research is applied, the synchrosqueezed transform.

**Keywords:** laser ultrasound, internal defect detection, wavelet transform, synchrosqueezed transform, time of flight, nondestructive testing
