Pulse-length-tolerant features and detectors for sector-scan sonar imagery

This paper presents a neural-network-based system to detect small man-made objects in sequences of sector-scan sonar images created using signals of various pulse lengths. The detection of such objects is considered out to ranges of 150 m by using an experimental sector-scan sonar system mounted on a vessel. The sonar system considered in this investigation has three modes of operation to create images over ranges of 200, 400, and 800 m from the vessel using acoustic pulses of a different duration for each mode. After an initial cleaning operation performed by compensating for the motion of the vessel, the imagery is segmented to extract objects for analysis. A set of 31 features extracted from each object is examined. These features consist of basic object size and contrast features, shape moment-based features, moment invariants, and features extracted from the second-order histogram of each object. Optimal sets of 15 features are then selected for each mode and over all modes using sequential forward selection (SFS) and sequential backward selection (SBS). These features are then used to train neural networks to detect man-made objects in each sonar mode. By the addition of a feature describing the sonar's mode of operation, a neural network is trained to detect man-made objects in any of the three sonar modes. The multimode detector is shown to perform very well when compared with detectors trained specifically for each sonar mode setting. The proposed detector is also shown to perform well when compared to a number of statistical detectors based on the same set of features. The proposed detector achieves a 92.4% probability of detection at a mean false-alarm rate of 10 per image, averaged over all sonar mode settings.