Current capabilities of sidescan sonars to provide high resolution imaging at high area search coverage rates for today's minehunting and ocean bottom mapping applications are limited by the finite aperture lengths associated with practical physical constraints on the underwater vehicle. Synthetic aperture techniques hold the key to extending resolution beyond these limits, due to their ability to achieve the larger apertures through coherent combination of spatially sampled signals, generated using shorter apertures.
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This manuscript is available at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ and may be cited as: Ciany, C. M., Walsh, G. M., & Clark, A. M. (1994). Propagation medium impact on sonar coherent processing for high frequency synthetic aperture imaging. Proceedings of the 1994 Symposium on Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Technology: July 19 and 20, 1994, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (pp. 289-296). New York, N.Y.: IEEE. doi:10.1109/AUV.1994.518638
Florida Atlantic University. Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute contribution #1031.