On reducing the artifacts of sonar images with image fusion technique

The work considers the artifacts compensation in the context of airborne ultrasonic image generation. Almost all airborne ultrasonic images used in robotics have artifacts and distortions, when comparing the real objects to those presented or identified in ultrasonic images. The differences between the real and reference images can have various causes, such as asymmetries in the directivity of the ultrasonic transducers, reflections in the explored environment, and nonlinearities of the signal processing blocks. A fusion-based method of reducing artifacts of sonar images is proposed and partially implemented. The object image from the ultrasonic image is fused with a reference image, selected from a database after an identification procedure. The selection rule used in image fusion is considered a supervised process. The results are encouraging and suggest a trade-off between complexity of fusion technique and quality of the result.