Shallow water height mapping with interferometric synthetic aperture sonar

Abstract

Height mapping of shallow water areas is an important task for many commercial and scientific applications like river navigability, infrastructure maintenance or natural resource monitoring. The use of an autonomous boat presents several advantages that ease the use of synthetic aperture images to create three-dimensional topographic maps through interferometric techniques. Sample data obtained during test trials illustrate how synthetic aperture can be used to generate imagery and bathymetry data.