GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK DATA GENERATION FOR THE USE OF REAL TIME IMAGE DETECTION IN SIDE-SCAN SONAR IMAGERY

Automatic target recognition of unexploded ordnances in side scan sonar imagery has been a struggling task, due to the lack of publicly available side-scan sonar data. Real time image detection and classification algorithms have been implemented to combat this task, however, machine learning algorithms require a substantial amount of training data to properly detect specific targets. Transfer learning methods are used to replace the need of large datasets, by using a pre trained network on the side-scan sonar images. In the present study the implementation of a generative adversarial network is used to generate meaningful sonar imagery from a small dataset. The generated images are then added to the existing dataset to train an image detection and classification algorithm. The study looks to demonstrate that generative images can be used to aid in detecting objects of interest in side-scan sonar imagery.