Using Frame Theoretic Convolutional Gridding for Robust Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imaging
This work addresses robustness issues in underwater imaging for sonar applications, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing non-uniform fast Fourier transform methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inaccurate and ill-conditioned 2D interpolation in Fourier domain synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imaging, which reduces robustness to speckle and sound-speed errors, by proposing the frame theoretic convolution gridding (FTCG) algorithm, which improves accuracy with little additional computational cost as demonstrated on simulated data.
Recent progress in synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) technology and processing has led to significant advances in underwater imaging, outperforming previously common approaches in both accuracy and efficiency. There are, however, inherent limitations to current SAS reconstruction methodology. In particular, popular and efficient Fourier domain SAS methods require a 2D interpolation which is often ill conditioned and inaccurate, inevitably reducing robustness with regard to speckle and inaccurate sound-speed estimation. To overcome these issues, we propose using the frame theoretic convolution gridding (FTCG) algorithm to handle the non-uniform Fourier data. FTCG extends upon non-uniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) algorithms by casting the NUFFT as an approximation problem given Fourier frame data. The FTCG has been show to yield improved accuracy at little more computational cost. Using simulated data, we outline how the FTCG can be used to enhance current SAS processing.