A novel image reconstruction algorithm for synthetic aperture sonar with single transmitter and multiple-receiver configuration

To overcome the azimuth sampling constraints imposed in synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), many SAS systems employ a single transmitter and multiple-receiver configuration, which can be regarded as a system containing many bistatic transmit-receive pairs. In traditional reconstruction, the multiple receiver system data is often preprocessed into an equivalent single receiver (monostatic) data by using the phase center approximation (PCA) and along track interpolation, and then followed by standard image reconstruction algorithms. But a blurring will occur at the edge of the target area as the length of the receiver array increasing. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to overcome the blurring problem caused by PCA based on the bistatic model. In this method, an image is firstly reconstructed with the data of each hydrophone independently, and then all the images are coherently added to give the high quality imagery. Simulation results show the feasibility and availability by applying this algorithm.