Multipath and noise suppression by coherently processing images of an interferometric SAS system

Abstract:
Most synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) systems are interferometric, i.e. they have vertically separated receiving antennas. With such systems two visually similar images can be generated that can be employed to generate high-fidelity seafloor bathymetry imagery using interferometry. Typically, one of the two SAS images is selected for display, stored and further processed, for example, by an automatic target recognition (ATR) system for mine hunting applications. Yet the secondary SAS image is usually ignored in additional post-processing schemes. In order to exploit all available information, a strategy is introduced how to fuse both SAS images so as to construct an image of superior quality. This fused SAS image can then be used for post-processing.