Shadows, a new synthetic aperture sonar system, by IXSEA SAS

Abstract

Shadows is a new Synthetic Aperture Sonar System developed by Ixsea SAS. It will provide a real-time SAS processing on a 600 meters swath at a resolution of 15 cm. Shadows is equiped by an accurate and highly synchronized INS, and by a frontside sonar to avoid the gap between the two sides. We present in this article the first results obtained with the first prototype of the sidescan sonar working at a frequency of 150 khz. This version can reach a precision of 20 cm at a range of 250 m. The computed algorithm performs a fast factorized back projection and ping to ping cross correlation (P2C2) in real time on the recorded signals. The resulting images are placed on a georeferenced map.