Not-Impulsive Techniques for Sonar Imaging

Techniques based on impulsive sources are used since the beginning of the Underwater Acoustic science, to evaluate the distance of objects and to plot the profile of the sea bottom. In this paper the authors investigate the behavior of three not-impulsive techniques for the measurement of impulse responses: MLS (Maximum Length Sequence) signal, linear sine sweep and logarithmic sine sweep. This work will focus the attention on advantages and defects of these tree different methods, in comparison with the traditional pulse-based sonar techniques. The mathematical theory for the generation of the MLS, sine sweep signals and for the deconvolution of the system’s impulse response are first described. Then a software implementation of the measurement methods, based on the creation of plug-ins for a shareware waveform editor, running on a low cost PC is demonstrated. Some experiments conducted under controlled conditions and in the sea show that the proposed techniques produce images of the bottom profile with higher signal-to-noise ratio and better spatial resolution than those obtainable with the impulsive technique. Moreover signal-to-noise ratio increases using sine sweep signal instead of MLS one. The new techniques seem superior also for some practical aspects connected with their very nature, which make them almost inaudible and makes the sound source barely localizable: this is very important for military applications.