Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar with an Autonomous Vehicle for 3D imaging of the seafloor

Abstract:
The NATO undersea research centre investigates future mine counter measures concepts based on autonomous vehicles. The mine hunting demonstrator is equipped with an interferometric synthetic aperture sonar on port and starboard side. Until now, only the top arrays are employed in order to generate automatically high resolution images of the seafloor. The seafloor bathymetry potentially provides extra information for detection and classification; and can further be used for improved motion estimates. The extra bathymetric information is automatically retrieved from the data processing chain developed. Interferometric results are compared to documented scenarios in order to prove the validity of the implementation.