Ultrasonic phased array theory and Total Focusing Method are introduced to identify internal defects of thick-walled pipelines，the image is reconstructed. Sparse Matrix Capture technology is used to reduce data volume and improve imaging efficiency, it simulated the ultrasonic phased array total focus imaging of thick-walled pipelines with the outer diameter of 550mm and the wall thickness of 65 mm by the finite element method. The results show that when the excitation center frequency is 5 MHz, the element width is 0.5 mm, the element spacing is 1 mm, the number of array elements is 32. the effectively of the image of Sparse Matrix Capture-Total Focusing Method is 74.81% higher than that of Full Matrix Capture-Total Focusing Method, which is improves the imaging speed and meets the requirements of rapid imaging.