Real-time sidescan simulator and applications

New generations of sonars appeared in the last decade. The major interest in SAS systems and high frequency sonars is in the improvement of the sonar resolution and the reduction of noise level. Sonar images are distance-images but at high resolution they tends to appear visually as optical images. Usually the algorithms developed for sidescan were specific for sonar images due to the poor resolution essentially. With high resolution sonars, algorithms developed in the image processing field for natural images became applicable. In this paper we present a real-time and realistic sidescan simulator, and test image-based classification algorithms (such as PCA and eigenface algorithms) with synthetic images in order to characterize the precision necessary for these image-based algorithm to work.