A multistatic synthetic aperture sonar to detect a cylinder lying on a rough interface: experimental results

Abstract

Monostatic Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) are high resolution systems for target imaging which are now of common use in the underwater acoustics domain. The objective of this work was to analyse what kind of information should be obtained from a multistatic SAS system. This idea has been applied in radar but very few works exist in the underwater acoustics domain. The applications could be detection and identification of buried mines or mines lying on the seabed and divers detection for harbour protection. These applications deal with the problem of target detection and identification near a rough surface. To show what can be obtained with a multistatic SAS processing, we have performed an experiment with a circular cylinder of 1 cm diameter lying on a rough interface made of sand grains of 1 mm diameter. Measurements were performed in a tank with both a multistatic and a monostatic SAS systems. The signal used to insonified the target area was a short impulse with a 2 MHz central frequency which correspo...