Research of ship wake tracking based on image sonar

A long "V" shaped linear wake with lots of bubbles is formed behind a sailing ship, which provides a target feature of the ship. Ship wake acoustic detection is one of the most effective ways for the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle to automatically search, track and attack surface targets. In this paper, we processed the sonar image data of ship wake in the lake test, using the sonar image sequence of multiple features fusion method and Kalman filter method, matching the acoustic scattering strength characteristic and geometric characteristics to realize the detection and tracking of ship wake.