Towards real-time simulation of the sidescan sonar imaging process

This paper describes the functional theory and design of a modular simulator developed to generate physically representative spatio-temporal sidescan sonar echo data from a fractal model of the seafloor topography. The main contribution of this paper is in significantly reducing the computational bottleneck inherent in existing simulation models due to the size and resolution of the complex seafloor models required for acoustic reverberation modelling. Discovery of the individual faces within the footprint of the acoustic beam at each ping is considerably accelerated by successfully adapting and integrating an optimised mesh refinement scheme intended for interactive rendering of large-scale complex surfaces described by polygonal meshes. Operational features of the simulator permit direct visualisation of the sonar image formed from successive echo lines and synthetic images generated during simulation are presented.