Sediment acoustic characterization by optimizing single-beam sonar echoes

This paper characterizes sediment geoacoustic properties using single beam sonar echoes collected from a sea trial conducted in 2010. The characteristic parameters of a sediment, e.g., mean grain size are estimated by matching the envelops of collected echoes and predicted replicas by a high-frequency backscattered model. The envelopes of real data were first averaged over a certain number of pins to avoid the interfering effect due to the sonar attitude variation during the survey, and then processed by the characterization algorithm based on a self-adapting Simulated Annealing algorithm. The estimated mean grain size suggests the surface sediment is sand-type, and the estimated sound speed by an empirical equation is in good agreement with that of geoacoustic inversion.