Simulation Research On Bathymetric Sidescan Sonar

Bathymetric sidescan sonar systems is a sort of seabed terrain surveying and mapping equipment and offer great improvement over conventional hydrographic and bathymetric techniques because their broad swath makes it possible to survey an area more efficiently, their high spatial resolution makes it less likely to miss an obstruction or feature, their image output gives valuable information about the bottom composition.In this paper, putting forward and reasoning the technical parameters of bathymetric sidescan sonar and the design of sonar array.To resolve the multipath reflection and other directional interference, a coherent source direction estimator to resolve two sources from different directions is proposed. This method is compared with the ESPRIT-based approach using different sonar data models. The simulations show that coherent source direction estimator works very well for highly coherent sources while the ESPRIT-based method is quite robust for the incoherent source signal model. The results suggest that the combination of two approaches could get a better performance in shallow water without significant increase of the system cost.A new method-the phase center comparison techniques for calculating the direction-of-arrival (DOA), and thus the bathymetry of the seafloor, is presented. This method will calculate the DOA directly from the phase difference between the phase centers of the array. The method is a numeric approach, instead of a parametric method. The bathymetry calculated can produce a real time display since this algorithm is performed quickly. Through computer simulation and trial data, the method is proved effectively.