Underwater source localization in a tank with two parallel moving hydrophone arrays

Presently the synthetic aperture technique is widely used especially for the case where higher resolution images are needed. Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) in the passive mode is one of the good examples that use this technique. Recently KIRSO performed a tank experiment for high resolution underwater source localization using two horizontally moving linear hydrophone arrays. The frequency interpolation and back projection algorithms are applied for obtaining SAS images. The precise source location can be identified in the horizontal plane whereas the vertical resolution is poor. However, we can conclude that the SAS processing is a more efficient method than the conventional beamforming algorithm. A simulation with the same configuration is also performed in order to verify the SAS algorithms and the results are very similar to the experimental analysis.