Imaging in the ocean with ambient noise: the ORB experiments

Abstract

Acoustic daylight imaging is a new technique that has been proposed for creating pictorial images of objects in the ocean from the ensonification provided by the incident ambient noise field. To investigate the feasibility of the technique, a series of experiments was performed from the research platform ORB, moored in San Diego Bay, Southern California. Central to these experiments was an acoustic receiver known as ADONIS (acoustic daylight ocean noise imaging system), which consists of a spherical reflector, 3 m in diameter, with an elliptical array of 130 hydrophones at the focal surface. This system, which is broadband, operating between 8 and 80 kHz, forms a total of 126 receive-only beams spanning the vertical and horizontal. The ambient noise power in each beam is mapped into a pixel on a VDU. Various types of targets were used in the experiments, including planar panels and cylindrical, polyethylene drums containing wet sand, seawater or syntactic foam (essentially air), and most of the experiments were conducted with the targets at ranges between 20 and 40 m. At the time of the experiments the noise field in the area was created primarily by snapping shrimp. Moving, color images of the object space were successfully created with ADONIS. Some representative static images from the moving sequences are presented and discussed in the paper.