Improvement in Discrimination by Eliciting Properties of Echo Signals from Different Seabed Materials

Abstract

To improve the discrimination ratio of seabed materials, considering that the difference in scattering style brings forth the difference in the duration time of echo signals corresponding to different materials, the product of the area intensity, which is employed in our previous method, and the effective duration time of echo signal is defined as a new time-weighted intensity, and is introduced to elicit the reflection properties with clearer differences between different materials. Three types of material, namely, crushed stone, sea sand, and mud, are measured. The distributions of two types of intensity corresponding to different materials are compared, and the comparison results show that the newly proposed intensities provide more differences between materials than the previous area intensities. Moreover, the discrimination ratio of materials is improved significantly, and all the discrimination ratios for three types of material up to more than 90% are obtained.