Airborne synthetic aperture acoustic imaging

This paper presents a system model and inversion for airborne synthetic aperture acoustic (SAA) imaging. The system model accurately represents the intercation of the acoustic source and the target region at near range values. Moreover, the model incorporates the fact that the relative speed of the vehicle’s (transmitter/receiver) with respect to the target region is comparable to the acoustic wave propagation speed. The inversion utilizes the principle of spectral decomposition of spherical phase functions to develop a wavefront reconstruction method from SAA data. Processing issues and selection of appropriate acoustic FM–CW sources are discussed. Results are provided that exhibit the superior accuracy of the proposed SAA system model and inversion over their synthetic aperture radar (SAR) counterpart in which the vehicle’s speed is assumed to be much smaller than the wave propagation speed.