An Image Quality Improvement Method in Side-Scan Sonar Based on Deconvolution

Side-scan sonar (SSS) is an important underwater imaging method that has high resolutions and is convenient to use. However, due to the restriction of conventional pulse compression technology, the side-scan sonar beam sidelobe in the range direction is relatively high, which affects the definition and contrast of images. When working in a shallow-water environment, image quality is especially influenced by strong bottom reverberation or other targets on the seabed. To solve this problem, a method for image-quality improvement based on deconvolution is proposed herein. In this method, to increase the range resolution and lower the sidelobe, a deconvolution algorithm is employed to improve the conventional pulse compression. In our simulation, the tolerance of the algorithm to different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and the resolution ability of multi-target conditions were analyzed. Furthermore, the proposed method was applied to actual underwater data. The experimental results showed that the quality of underwater acoustic imaging could be effectively improved. The ratios of improvement for the SNR and contrast ratio (CR) were 32 and 12.5%, respectively. The target segmentation results based on this method are also shown. The accuracy of segmentation was effectively improved.