Frequency response (Dynamics)

The problem of inverse scattering where the scattering structure is unknown, and the physical properties are predicted from the measured echo when the target is insonified with known waveforms, is investigated in this thesis. The scattering structure studied is a submerged, evacuated, spherical elastic shell. The formulation of the echo is carried out using thin shell theory for low and middle frequency range, which basically assumes that shear stresses are negligible. The echo is characterized by the form function in the frequency domain, and the impulse response in the time domain. The results of this thesis show that when using a chirp signal with a 200-250kHz bandwidth as the incident waveform, both the material and size of the shell can be recovered. However, the exact thickness of the shell wall couldn't be extracted.

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of various low-frequency sonar signature representations and their ability to discriminate between proud targets of varying physical parameters. The signature representations used include: synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) beamformed images, acoustic color plot images, and bispectral images. A relative Mean-Square Error (rMSE) performance metric and an effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNReff) performance metric have been developed and implemented to quantify the target differentiation. The analysis is performed on a subset of the synthetic sonar stave data provided by the Naval Surface Warfare Center - Panama City Division (NSWC-PCD). The subset is limited to aluminum and stainless steel, thin-shell, spherical targets in contact with the seafloor (proud). It is determined that the SAS signature representation provides the best, least ambiguous, target differentiation with a minimum mismatch difference of 14.5802 dB. The acoustic color plot and bispectrum representations resulted in a minimum difference of 9.1139 dB and 1.8829 dB, respectively

Professional imaging systems, particularly motion picture cameras, usually employ larger photosites and lower pixel counts than many amateur cameras. This results in the desirable characteristics of improved dynamic range, signal to noise and sensitivity. However, high performance optics often have frequency response characteristics that exceed the Nyquist limit of the sensor, which, if not properly addressed, results in aliasing artifacts in the captured image. Most contemporary still and video cameras employ various optically birefringent materials as optical low-pass filters (OLPF) in order to minimize aliasing artifacts in the image. Most OLPFs are designed as optical elements with a frequency response that does not change even if the frequency responses of the other elements of the capturing systems are altered. An extended evaluation of currently used birefringent-based OLPFs is provided. In this work, the author proposed and demonstrated the use of a parallel optical window p ositioned between a lens and a sensor as an OLPF. Controlled X- and Y-axes rotations of the optical window during the image exposure results in a manipulation of the system's point-spread function (PSF). Consequently, changing the PSF affects some portions of the frequency components contained in the image formed on the sensor. The system frequency response is evaluated when various window functions are used to shape the lens' PSF, such as rectangle, triangle, Tukey, Gaussian, Blackman-Harris etc. In addition to the ability to change the PSF, this work demonstrated that the PSF can be manipulated dynamically, which allowed us to modify the PSF to counteract any alteration of other optical elements of the capturing system. There are several instances presented in the dissertation in which it is desirable to change the characteristics of an OLPF in a controlled way.