A noval acoustical vision system design for automated underwater vehicles

For better performing the task of target detection and recognition by the automated underwater vehicles (AUVs), we proposed a noval acoustical vision system (AVS) model and its operating procedure which was composed of three kinds of high resolution imaging sonar. The AVS could detect waters forward and downward simultaneously and classify the target roughly in remote distance and accurately at short range. In the formulation tests, with the images obtained by the AVS, we used the bi-spectrum peaks to judge the targetpsila s existence at seabed and an algorithm based on discrete Radon transform to recognize frontal objects. In the end, we get good performances all for the above tasks, so it is proved an energetic vision device for AUVs in practical application.