Method of Extracting Information from Single Beam Forward-Looking Sonar

A method of extracting information from raw sonar scanline data generated by a single-beam FLS mounted on a small UUV(unmanned underwater vehicle) is described.The bearing and distance information has been acquired through this method and this result could be highly used in the problems of auto-tracking and obstacle detection and avoidance.This procedure includes generating sonar image by raw sonar scanline data,processing the raw sonar image and extracting feature information of objects detected in the processed image. Aiming at extracting the edge feature information of a large object,a segmented curve fitting method is proposed based on least squares theory and the effectiveness of the method is verified by the experiment of processing the actual data acquired from the laboratory pool.