Detection of Underwater Targets Using a Subspace-Based Method With Learning

This paper introduces a new subspace-based detection method for multichannel (high frequency and broadband) synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery. An image-dependent dictionary learning method is applied to form the appropriate dictionary matrices for representing target and nontarget image snippets. The hypothesis testing is done by forming a test statistic that relies on the residual error power ratio in representing an unknown image snippet using the target and nontarget dictionary matrices. To avoid the computational bottleneck in most dictionary learning methods, a new recursive method is introduced which does not require any matrix inversion or singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed detection method was then implemented and benchmarked against a matched subspace detection method for detecting mine-like objects. Results are then presented on two sonar imagery data sets collected in two geographically disparate locations.