Synthetic aperture bathymetry estimation with a multielement array

  • Authors:

  • Michael Hayes;Alan Hunter

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand;TNO, The Hague, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Bathymetric estimation from multiple synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) images is challenging for shallow water environments with low frequencies. This is due to the multipath echoes corrupting the desired direct-path echoes. In an attempt to suppress some of these multipaths, the MUD synthetic aperture sonar developed at TNO has a sixteen element vertical hydrophone array. In this paper we consider a number of different bathymetry estimation techniques using multielement vertical arrays. We introduce an ad-hoc multilook variant of the matrix pencil method and find that it outperforms beamformed interferometry, extending the range of useful bathymetry until the problematic multipath mode produces a similar angle of arrival that cannot be resolved.