1. A system for thermal transient imaging of an object, the system comprising: a radiation source configured to irradiate the object with radiation in accordance with an excitation profile; an imaging device comprising an array of detector pixels and configured to detect thermal radiation from a surface of the object; a processor configured to: obtain a series of frames of thermal image data of the surface acquired by the imaging device over time when the object is irradiated by the radiation source; and; process, using the excitation profile, the series of frames of thermal image data to transform the thermal image data to an equivalent wave field representation that represents a series of depth-resolved virtual images of the object, each depth-resolved virtual image representing a particular depth within the object from the surface; and a data storage that is configured to store one or a plurality of linear transformations that are applicable to the thermal image data to transform the thermal image data to the equivalent wave representation, each of the linear transformations that is applicable to a pixel of the time series of the frames that are acquired at times t d being representable by an inverse of a matrix of the form W ⁡ ( t d , t w ) = ℒ - 1 ⁢ { e - st w ⁢ H d ⁡ ( s ) H w ⁡ ( s ) , t d } , where t w represents a virtual time of each of the virtual images, −1 represents the inverse Laplace transform, H d (s) represents a Laplace transform of thermal excitation by the radiation source, H w (√{square root over (s)}) represents the Laplace transform of a virtual wave excitation, and s is a Laplace transform variable.