On the use of higher order statistics in SAS imagery [synthetic aperture sonar

Abstract

Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery is largely used in detection, location and classification of underwater mines laying on or buried in the sea bed. This paper proposes a detection method using higher order statistics (HOS) on SAS images. The proposed method can be divided into two steps. Firstly, the HOS (skewness and kurtosis) are locally estimated using a square sliding computation window. In a second step, the results are focused by a correlation process. This enables the precise location of the objects. This method is tested on real SAS data containing both underwater mines laying on the sea bed and buried objects.