Synthetic Aperture Processing for Sonar Imaging System

This paper introduces a coherence analysis method to generate synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) images which is useful for the classification of buried underwater objects. Motivated by the high-resolution achievable by modern imaging sonars, a novel template matching technique is developed that compares a target signature generated from a simple acoustic model with the actual image of an object being classified. The approach uses both the correlation with target echoes and is tested on MATLAB experiments. The effectiveness of these methods is demonstrated on simulated databases comparing generated SAS method and by applying a simple but effective classification framework.