Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar Signal Processing for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Operating Shallow Water

University of New Orleans, 2012My goal is to present a summary of basic ocean physics to lay the foundation for Interferometric synthetic aperture sonar (InSAS) processing in the shallow water acoustic environment. Ocean acoustic models derived from the previously mentioned physics will be used to predict the acoustic response of the sonar in a large set of ocean environments. Beamforming signal processing techniques are presented to give a basic understanding of what is involved in converting the changes in ocean pressures at the sonar face into meaningful digital electronic data to form images of the ocean bottom. The details of standard practices for synthetic aperture sonar will be presented to build the framework for three dimensional bathymetric imaging. The thrust of this investigation will be to benchmark the methods of InSAS bathymetric height and phase unwrapping techniques. The eloquence of the Matrix Inversion Lemma, the Principle of Stationary Phase and the Principle of Orthogonality are revealed and their usefulness in signal processing is extremely valuable.