Improved synthetic aperture sonar motion compensation combined DPCA with Sub-Aperture Image Correlation

Estimation precision of Displaced Phase Center Algorithm (DPCA) is affected by the number of displaced phase center pairs, the bandwidth of transmitting signal and many other factors. Detailed analysis is made on DPCA's estimation precision. Analysis results show that the directional vector estimation precision of DPCA is low, which will produce accumulating errors when phase centers' track is estimated. Because of this reason, DPCA suffers from accumulating errors seriously. To overcome this problem, a method combining DPCA with Sub Aperture Image Correlation (SAIC) is presented. Large synthetic aperture is divided into sub-apertures. Micro errors in sub-aperture are estimated by DPCA and compensated to raw echo data. Bulk errors between sub-apertures are estimated by SAIC and compensated directly to sub-aperture images. After that, sub-aperture images are directly used to generate ultimate SAS image. The method is applied to the lake-trial dataset of a 20 kHz SAS prototype system. Results show the method can successfully remove the accumulating error and produce a better SAS image.