A Study on Mine Localization of Forward Looking Sonar Considering the Effect of Underwater Sound Refraction

Abstract

Mine detection has been mainly studied with images of the forward-looking sonar. Forward-looking sonar assumes the propagation path of the sound wave as a straight path, creating the surrounding images. This might lead to errors in the detection by ignoring the refraction of the sound wave. In this study, we propose a mine localization method that can robustly identify the location of mines in an underwater environment by considering the refraction of sound waves. We propose a method of estimating the elevation angle of arrival of the target echo signal in a single receiver, and estimate the mine location by applying the estimated elevation angle of arrival to ray tracing. As a result of simulation, the method proposed in this paper was more effective in estimating the mine localization than the existing method that assumed the propagation path as a straight line.