The Applied Physics Laboratory and its subcontractors have been leaders in the development of programmable sonar signal processors for 19 years. Several novel architectures for both hardware and software have resulted, giving APL the most powerful sonar signal-processing facilities in the United States. This article traces the historical evolution of sonar-processing hardware, with emphasis on ...

This paper studies the inverse problem of determining the shape and medium parameters of a smooth seafloor from sonar data. The first section of the paper reviews beamforming techniques and the Kirchhoff (high-frequency) approximation. The second section carries out a stationary phase calculation for various measurement configurations associated with side-scan sonar and pencil-beam sonar. These...

The paper presents signal processing and control algorithms that enable autonomous tracking of the boundaries between distinct benthic regions by an AUV equipped of a profiler sonar. A novel sonar classification algorithm is presented, which uses the signature of the ocean floor in the incoming profilers to discriminate between distinct materials. By exploiting sonar scans of the region below t...

The Sonar Performance Prediction System (SPPS) will be introduced. The SPPS is an integrated ocean-acoustic propagation model coupled with a sonar performance prediction model. A stationary sea surveillance sonar consisting of a horizontally nested hydrophone array and a vertical transmitting/ receiving array may be used lo dctcct, localisc and track surface and subsurfacc contacts within its c...

To solve the low efficiency of traditional synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imaging problem, a sonar imaging system combining compressed sensing (CS) and template compressed sensing (TCS) was proposed. The system used sonar network to image scenes. With 10% amount of traditional SAS data, CS and TCS algorithms could recover the image exploiting the structured sparsity of the interested scene with...

Robotics research is heavily dependent on fast, accurate, reliable and cheap sensors. Sonar sensing can fulfil these requirements in air and underwater environments. Moreover sonar physics provides robotics researchers with a natural selection capability for landmark detection in navigation problems. This paper presents new sonar results that allow high-speed accurate measurement and classifica...

This paper presents the advanced sonar sensor model capable of building an underwater terrain map based on the Bayes filter in the manner of the occupancy grid. The proposed sonar sensor model basically considers the losses of received ultrasound intensity according to the underwater absorption and reflection on a terrain surface. The Bayes filter including the advanced sonar sensor model is ap...

An expert system can process active sonar returns, perform geometric analysis and autonomously classify detected underwater objects. Autonomous classification of objects is an essential requirement for independent operation by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Most AUVs are only capable of rudimentary sensor analysis, since standard approaches to evaluation and classification of sonar data...

Echolocating bats use active sensing as they emit sounds and listen to the returning echoes to probe their environment for navigation, obstacle avoidance and pursuit of prey. The sensing behavior of bats includes the planning of 3D spatial trajectory paths, which are guided by echo information. In this study, we examined the relationship between active sonar sampling and flight motor output as ...

Fields of distributed passive and multistatic active sonar sensors provide a surveillance capability against quiet submarine threats in ASW scenarios. A significant challenge of heterogeneous, multi-sensor systems is the successful fusion of information from the various sensors to enable robust target detection, classification, localization, and tracking. Sensor fusion and tracking algorithms m...