Sparse-increment iteration-based sound velocity profile estimation with multi-beam bathymetry systems

This paper presents a method to estimate the sound velocity profile (SVP) of the water column along with the bathymetry using overlapping swaths obtained from a multi-beam system. The method exploits the terrain deviations in the overlapped regions of different survey tracks. Such deviation is closely related to the SVP errors, and hence by minimizing the deviations, the SVP can be updated from the prior value. Furthermore, a sparse-increment iteration-based method is developed to solve the estimation problem, which is quite efficient in computation. Both simulated and experimental data processing results demonstrate that the proposed method can yield an SVP estimate converging to the true SVP value after a limited number of iterations while generating more precise depth measurements.