Inversion Assuming Weak Scattering

The study of weak scattering from inhomogeneous media or interface roughness has long been of interest in sonar applications. In an acoustic backscattering model of a stationary field of volume inhomogeneities, a stochastic description of the field is more useful than a deterministic description due to the complex nature of the field. A method based on linear inversion is employed to infer information about the statistical properties of the scattering field from the obtained cross-spectral matrix. A synthetic example based on an active high-frequency sonar demonstrates that the proposed method provides a quantitative description of a weak scattering field in terms of its second-order statistics.