A Multibeam Underwater Terrain Modeling Algorithm Based on Echo Energy Distribution Gradient*

In the field of underwater robot, abundant researches have been carried out in development of multibeam echo-sounding bottom detection. However, most works focused on the analysis of the amplitude of the reverberated echo which had its own limitation. In this paper, a new algorithm based on the multibeam echo energy gradient is developed to map the shallow water bottom topography. On this basis, all single-frame bottom depth curves are joined together to form a seabed surface. Kalman filter is further used to remove outliers and improve the reliability of surface mapping. The effectiveness of our algorithm is validated by both simulation and practical experiment.