Robotics: Science and Systems I

On Correlating Sonar Images

Richard J. Rikoski, J. Tory Cobb, Daniel C. Brown

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that sonar images correlate badly because target geometry and image fringes correlate in different coordinate systems. It is shown that if the receiver is a line array, all point objects have the same image in a coordinate system with axes of range and the sine of target bearing (the (r, s) coordinate system). Results from an ocean experiment are presented. The ocean experiment shows that after a simple translation, the correlation coefficient between Cartesian images of a radar reflector drop to zero, while the correlation coefficient between images of the same radar reflector in an (r, s) coordinate system hover around 0.9.

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Bibtex:

@INPROCEEDINGS{ Rikoski-RSS-05,
    AUTHOR    = {Richard J. Rikoski and J. Tory Cobb and Daniel C. Brown},
    TITLE     = {On Correlating Sonar Images},
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems},
    YEAR      = {2005},
    ADDRESS   = {Cambridge, USA},
    MONTH     = {June},
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2005.I.023} 
}