Abstract
Interest in the application of synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) to seafloor mapping and object detection has been increasing in recent years. Because images of the seafloor obtained with SAS systems can sometimes exhibit large pixel-to-pixel fluctuations, robust seafloor segmentation or target detection still requires a thorough understanding of the SAS image statistics and their relation to seafloor parameters. As part of the SAX04 sediment acoustics experiment, acoustic data suitable for SAS processing were collected using a bottom-mounted rail system off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico in October, 2004. This unique data set has been used to explore several important aspects of SAS image statistics including their dependence on system resolution and on the correlation structure of SAS reverberation due to ripples that were present at the study site. Models of the reverberation envelope probability distribution function (pdf) based on the K-distribution have been found to well describe the reverberation environment for systems with lower resolutions than possible with broadband SAS systems. Characterization and modeling of SAS image statistics based on the K-distribution and using ground truth collected during SAX04 will be presented. [Work performed under ONR Grants N00014-04-1-0013 and N00014-06-1-0245.]
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