Acoustic detection of buried objects

The capability to detect objects buried in the sea bottom is important for many reasons. For example bottom mines as well as dumped chemical munitions can be expected to have been buried by the sedimentation. Standard sub-bottom profilers that are routinely used for mapping sediment structures do not have good enough resolution to detect small buried objects. A parametric sonar, with a much smaller lobe, is much more appropriate. In the report, we show results from measurements with a parametric sonar, mounted on a ROV (remotely operated vehicle). The measurements were made in the archipelago of Stockholm with a test object buried in clay. Two techniques were used to improve the detection capability, image processing and FARIM analysis. Concerning image processing, median filtering turns out to provide the best results. Isolated noisy pings are effectively suppressed in this way. FARIM analysis can be used to estimate roughness and impedance of the bottom. Our experiments show that a buried object can often be detected by an anomaly in the impedance estimate. Among three tested center frequencies for the emitted pulse, 5, 10 and 20 kHz, the highest frequency (20 kHz) turns out to provide the best detection capability. This is true for the image processing results as well as for the FARIM results. We have tried bistatic techniques to characterize a detected buried object. Sound pulses are emitted towards the object from one direction and the scattered energy is studied at another direction. We show computational results from a recently developed numerical model. The scattered field turns out to be very sensitive to the properties of the object.