Phasewrap error correction for micronavigation in synthetic aperture systems

The reconstruction of high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) images requires precise knowledge about sensor positions for consecutive transmission times in order to build a synthetic aperture. In order to support the navigation system, typically motion compensation techniques based on estimating the time delays of the raw echo signals are performed. However, given operational hardware constraints, an undersampling of the carrier phase introduces biased time delay estimates due to phase wrap errors, leading to wrong position estimates. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on binary image processing techniques to compensate the bias.