Model-Based Adaptive 3D Sonar Reconstruction in Reverberating Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel model-based approach for 3D underwater scene reconstruction, i.e., bathymetry, for side scan sonar arrays in complex and highly reverberating environments like shallow water areas. The presence of multipath echoes and volume reverberation generates false depth estimates. To improve the resulting bathymetry, this paper proposes and develops an adaptive filter, based on several original geometrical models. This multimodel approach makes it possible to track and separate the direction of arrival trajectories of multiple echoes impinging the array. Echo tracking is perceived as a model-based processing stage, incorporating prior information on the temporal evolution of echoes in order to reject cluttered observations generated by interfering echoes. The results of the proposed filter on simulated and real sonar data showcase the clutter-free and regularized bathymetric reconstruction. Model validation is carried out with goodness of fit tests, and demonstrates the importance of model-based processing for bathymetry reconstruction.

Automatic Detection Technology of Sonar Image Target Based on the Three-Dimensional Imaging

“…Sonar image preprocessing is the foundation of the sonar image processing and an indispensable part of image recognition [10][11][12][13]. Image preprocessing mainly includes image denoising and enhancement.…”

Student research highlight enhanced sonar bathymetry: An echo DOA tracking approach

“…In [9] and [10], we proposed a TWS system that tracks the DOA of echoes obtained after thresholding an angular power distribution of the received array signal, i.e., the signal spectrogram. Spectrograms are computed using array processing methods [1].…”

“…Thus, tracking is performed with a multitarget variant of the probabilistic data association flter. Geometrical models are proposed in [10] for DOA tracking and represent the prior on echo trajectories. Results obtained for real sonar data processing are given in [9] and [10].…”

“…Geometrical models are proposed in [10] for DOA tracking and represent the prior on echo trajectories. Results obtained for real sonar data processing are given in [9] and [10]. In the absence of ground truth data, we validate these results by residual whiteness tests, concluding the adequacy of the models for echo DOA tracking.…”

Marked poisson point process PHD filter for DOA tracking

“…Secondly, filtering the DOA estimates with the kinematic target-model and resolving the origin uncertainty problem is dealt with probabilistic data association filters [1]. In [2,3] we proposed a TWS system for a sonar image reconstruction application.…”