Improving automatic mapping of sediment layers with the wavelet packets

Remote acoustic characterization of the physical properties of marine sediments is of great interest to the geological and acoustical communities to display different subbottom layers and to collect information about acoustic sound propagation at low frequencies. Subbottom profilers are designed to generate cross-sectional images of ocean sediment layering. Energy reflected from the subbottom layers responding to artificial acoustic source excitation is recorded as a time series called a trace. A subbottom profile image is composed of adjacent traces. The aim of the interpretation of these images is to identify the sediment layers and later to build a sedimentary database. The automatic mapping of subbottom layers should significantly speed up data analysis. We develop, keeping this aim in mind, an image processing algorithm for automatically outlining the sediment layers in subbottom profiler images. This algorithm is based on the wavelet packet analysis and a correlation criterion.