Development of acoustic camera-imaging simulator based on novel model

Acquisition of accurate image information from underwater environments is essential to operate underwater tasks such as maintenance, inspection, trajectory estimation, target recognition and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). In this respect, an acoustic camera is superior device because it can provide images with more accurate details than what the optical cameras provide even in turbid water. However, the structure of the acoustic image is very dissimilar to that of optical image because the acoustic camera provides sequences of distance and azimuth angle data, which elevation angle data are missing. Consequently, it is difficult to generate simulated acoustic images although simulating realistic images is vital for verification for performance of proposed algorithms and saving costs and time. This paper describes the principles of acoustic natures and imaging geometry model of the acoustic camera which greatly contribute to developing simulator for the acoustic images. When compared to a state-of-the-art technique, our approach demonstrates surpassing performance in representing simulated acoustic images in complete gray-scale. We evaluate the simulated images from developed simulator by comparing with real acoustic images. The results indicate that the proposed simulator can generate realistic virtual acoustic images based on the principles.