G. S. Sammelmann
J. T. Christoff
J. D. Lathrop
Code 130B, Coastal Systems Sta., Panama City, FL 32407
Coastal Systems Station is developing a high-fidelity simulation of low- and high-frequency imaging synthetic aperture sonars in coastal regions. This simulation includes a coherent bottom and surface reverberation model that treats reverberation as a Gaussian random process; 3-D coherent beam patterns for the projector and receiver arrays; a 3-D coherent target strength model of an arbitrarily shaped target that treats the target strength as the coherent sum of the inelastic scattering from a large number of facets, edges, and point scatterers; and the inclusion of multipaths in the calculation of the reverberation and target returns. This simulation generates synthetic images of proud and buried targets. A number of examples of images will be presented showing the effects of system parameters and operating conditions on synthetic aperture sonar imaging. [Work supported by ONR.]