Circular synthetic aperture sonar imaging using isometric angle characteristic

Abstract

Circular synthetic aperture sonar (CSAS) can provide fine image of interest region in three dimensions through the sonar movement along a circle at a fixed height. The severe computation complexity of the state-of-the-art imaging algorithms is of great trouble during the usage process of CSAS. According to the relationship between the azimuth and the peak-valued curve of the returns of CSAS, the isometric angle characteristic is revealed in the paper. A fast inverse algorithm of CSAS imaging employing the isometric angle characteristic is proposed combined with CLEAN algorithm. The numerical experiments show the effectiveness and the low computational complexity of the proposed algorithm.