A rasterized ray-tracer pipeline for real-time, multi-device sonar simulation
This work addresses the need for efficient and realistic sonar simulation for underwater applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods by integrating more acoustic properties.
The paper tackled the problem of simulating sonar devices by developing a multi-device sonar simulator that uses a hybrid GPU pipeline combining rasterization and ray-tracing, achieving significant performance gains without quality loss. It processes underwater scenes to compute sonar parameters like echo intensity and pulse distance, incorporating acoustic features such as speckle noise and transmission loss.
Simulating sonar devices requires modeling complex underwater acoustics, simultaneously rendering time-efficient data. Existing methods focus on basic implementation of one sonar type, where most of sound properties are disregarded. In this context, this work presents a multi-device sonar simulator capable of processing an underwater scene by a hybrid pipeline on GPU: Rasterization computes the primary intersections, while only the reflective areas are ray-traced. Our proposed system launches few rays when compared to a full ray-tracing based method, achieving a significant performance gain without quality loss in the final rendering. Resulting reflections are then characterized as two sonar parameters: Echo intensity and pulse distance. Underwater acoustic features, such as speckle noise, transmission loss, reverberation and material properties of observable objects are also computed in the final generated acoustic image. Visual and numerical performance assessments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed simulator to render underwater scenes in comparison to real-world sonar devices.