Buried object detection with Synthetic Aperture Sonar

This work presents the experimental results of buried objects detection with a prototype Low Frequency Synthetic Aperture Sonar (LF-SAS). The experiment was carried out to ensure motion compensation algorithm and to study the availability of target detection both on the seabed and in the sediments. The experimental system mainly consists of tow-fish and control equipment. The tow-fish has a transducer array which can transmit and receive around 7 kHz acoustic signal, and the control equipment controls the tow-fish and records the received signals. Data processing, which includes synthetic aperture beamformer and motion compensation, is carried out on a PC. The experimental results clearly show that the combination of low frequency acoustics and synthetic aperture processing with motion compensation is effective to detect mine-like targets on and under the seabed.