Robust underwater imaging with fast broadband incoherent synthetic aperture sonar

Synthetic aperture techniques have been of interest to the sonar imaging community, but suffer from the problems of maintaining phase coherence and a slow mapping rate. The need for rigorous and accurate platform trajectory monitoring often increases the design and implementation costs as well as the hardware complexity. This paper examines incoherent processing techniques and shows their potential for use in designing a robust and practical underwater imaging system. A novel, fast, incoherent, time-domain processing technique is presented. Advantages of using incoherent processing for 3-dimensional imaging are discussed. Broadband signals are used for achieving high range-resolution. Results from simulations and processing of sea-survey data are included.