Sonar

An automatic mine detection method has been designed for the purpose of locating mine-like objects on the seabed in real time using a high frequency, high resolution side scan sonar. The processing flow includes a calculation of the average scattering function of the local environment, shadow detection, and a fuzzy logic clustering/fuzzy logic detection procedure for identifying mine-like shadows. An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) equipped with a fuzzy detection system gives the Navy the capability of rapidly locating bottom mines in littoral underwater environments during over-the-horizon operations.

This thesis describes the implementation of a commercially available forward looking sonar (FLS) in an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) modified for the task of reactive obstacle detection. Any obstacle lying in the vehicle's path is a potential mission-terminating threat. Inclusion of a forward looking sensor would provide valuable information to the AUV. Threat assessment and navigation would use this information in order to avoid obstacles. The system used for this project is an 8-element transducer FLS at 200 kHz. The sonar control software is done in DOS on a dedicated personal computer in a PC/104 form factor. A variable cell-size grid occupancy search method is used to detect objects in the vehicle path. This thesis describes how this sonar is used for the obstacle detection task (software), how it is integrated (hardware and network) in the AUV and what are the results obtained with the system.

In this dissertation, the digital signal processing techniques required for a 3-D sonar imaging system are examined. The achievable performance of the generated images is investigated by using a combination of theoretical analysis, computer simulation and field experiments. The system consists of a forward looking sonar, with separate projector and receiver. The projector is a line source with an 80 degrees by 1.2 degree beam pattern, which is electronically scanned within a 150 degree sector. The receiver is a multi element line array, where each transducer element has a directivity pattern that covers the full sector of view, that is 150 degrees by 80 degrees. The purpose of this sonar system is to produce three dimensional (3-D) images which display the underwater topography within the sector of view up to a range of 200 meters. The principle of operation of the proposed 3-D imaging system differs from other commonly used systems in that it is not based on the intensity of backscatter. The geometries of the targets are obtained from the delay and direction information that can be extracted from the signal backscatter. The acquired data is further processed using an approach based on sequential Fourier transforms to build the 3-D images. With careful selection of the system parameters, the generated images have sufficient quality to be used for AUV tasks such as obstacle avoidance, navigation and object classification. An approach based on a sophisticated two dimensional (2-D) autoregressive (AR) model is explored to further improve the resolution and generate images with higher quality. The real time processing requirements for image generation are evaluated, with the use of dedicated Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips. A pipeline processing model is analyzed and developed on a selected system.