Performance Analysis of the Active SAS Autofocus Processing for UUV Trajectory Disturbances Compensation

An active synthetic aperture sonar mounted on small UUV is generated various trajectory disturbances in the traveling path by the influence of external underwater environments. That is the phase mismatch occurs in the synthetic aperture processing of the signals reflected from seabed objects and fetches the detection performance decreases. In this paper, we compensated deteriorated images by the active SAS autofocus processing using DPC and analyzed the effects of detection performance when the periodic trajectory disturbances occur in the side direction at a constant velocity and straight movement of UUV. Through simulations, the deteriorated images according to the periodic disturbance magnitudes and period variations in the platform were compensated using difference phases processing of the overlapping displaced phase centers on the adjacent transmitted ping signals, and we conformed the improved performance characteristics of azimuth resolution and detection images at 3dB reference point.