Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar (ISAS) offers the possibility of high resolution, three-dimensional images of objects on the ocean floor. The height of objects is identified from the phase difference between two synthetic aperture images of the object obtained using two receivers separated by a short distance. A central problem is the need to unwrap the phase difference in the presence of noise to obtain an unambiguous height estimate. This paper presents an end-to-end simulation of ISAS processing algorithms. The algorithms presented have been shown to work on real sonar data also.