Sonar image processing system for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)

The authors have made a sonar image processing system which is installed in the Chinese "Explorer" AUV. Based on an TMS320C30 high speed DSP, the system is used to realize sonar image compression and underwater object detection including obstacle recognition in real time. Pool and sea testing have been finished and shown good performance. In this paper, the system algorithm, software and hardware are introduced and the experimental results are given.