On the Effects of Synthetic-Aperture Length on SAS Seabed Segmentation

In this work, we quantify the relationship between synthetic-aperture length (or equivalently, along-track resolution) and seabed segmentation performance experimentally for real synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery. The seabed segmentation algorithm employed uses wavelet-based features, spectral clustering, and a variational Bayesian Gaussian mixture model. It is observed that for this approach, the correct seabed segmentation rate drops approximately ten percentage points for each halving of the along-track resolution between 3 cm and 96 cm. Moreover, changing the along-track resolution has the most significant effect on rocky seabeds.