Semisynthetic Versus Real-World Sonar Training Data for the Classification of Mine-Like Objects

The detection of mine-like objects (MLOs) in sidescan sonar (SSS) imagery continues to be a challenging task. In practice, subject matter experts tediously analyze images searching for MLOs. In the literature, there are many attempts at automated target recognition (ATR) to detect the MLOs. This paper focuses on the classifiers that use computer vision and machine learning approaches. These techniques require large amounts of data, which is often prohibitive. For this reason, the use of synthetic and semisynthetic data sets for training and testing is commonplace. This paper shows how a simple semisynthetic data creation scheme can be used to pretest these data-hungry training algorithms to determine what features are of value. The paper provides real-world testing and training data sets in addition to the semisynthetic training and testing data sets. The paper considers the Haar-like and local binary pattern (LBP) features with boosting, showing improvements in performance with real classifiers over semisynthetic classifiers and improvements in performance as semisynthetic data set size increases.