Distributed and parallel subarray beamforming for underwater real-time 3-D acoustic imaging

In this paper, we propose a distributed and parallel subarray beamforming (DPS) algorithm for performing underwater real-time 3-D acoustic imaging. The principle idea of this algorithm is that the full populated sensor array is subdivided into two stage distributed subarrays and the beamforming is carried out in parallel for each stage subarray. The proposed algorithm overcomes the problems of massive computational load affecting the engineering applications of the conventional beamforming techniques, while achieving the similar resolutions. The memory requirement obtained with the proposed algorithm is reduced by four orders of magnitude and the computational requirement is reduced by two orders of magnitude when compared with the conventional beamforming (CBF). The simulation and the comparisons illustrate the results and the efficiency of the algorithm.