Experiments were performed to demonstrate a new sonar concept. The concept involves assuming locations at which scatterers may exist and computing the strengths of scatterers at these locations that best match the data. This involves precomputing a matrix using the geometry of the sensors and transmission pulse information. The matrix is then reduced in size using singular value decomposition, which also takes care of ill-conditioning due to locating potential scatterers close together. In real-time operation of the sonar the incoming data is premultiplied by the matrix to produce a map of scatterers. A computer simulation showed the effects of the matrix rank on the scatterer map. As the rank moves away from full rank, the scatterer positions become blurred. In a laboratory experiment, we used one transmitting transducer and two receiving transducers. The signal was passed through an analog to digital converter. We demonstrate that simple scatterers can be located from this data using the new approach.

Date Published: 9 July 1992
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 1699, Signal Processing, Sensor Fusion, and Target Recognition, (9 July 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.138245

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1699:
Signal Processing, Sensor Fusion, and Target Recognition
Vibeke Libby; Ivan Kadar, Editor(s)