Abstract: The essence of the time reversal (TR) technique is investigated.TR is not only a physical process,but also a signal processing method.Thereby the concept time-reversal beamforming (TRBF) is come up with.To overcome the limitation of TR spatio-temporal focusing capability imposed by environmental uncertainty,transmitting TRBF with model instead of physical probe source is studied and robust minimum-variance receiving TRBF with diagonal loading is developed,and both of them are further applied to target detection.Tank experiment results show the availability of the methods in uncertain environment,where detection and distance estimation of the target are accomplished.