Multi Beam/Multi Aspect Image Data Fusion for Side Scan Sonars

Abstract:
Multi-Beam/Multi-Aspect side scan sonars create an image of a large area with each single ping. This is achieved by insonifying a horizontally and vertically large region, which is sampled with a multitude of horizontally steered receiving beams with small horizontal beam widths. The successive sonar images represent overlapping areas which are fused to one image of the scene. Straightforward superposition of the single ping sonar images results in the standard SNR gain for the fused image. The SNR can be further increased by applying image processing methods and sophisticated fusion strategies.