High resolution synthetic aperture sonar: trials and results

Synthetic aperture techniques have been very successfully applied in aircraft-borne and spaceborne imaging radar systems. Their use in underwater sonar systems has considerable attraction in several applications, but realisation of practical systems has been rather slower than with radar systems. In practice, several of the processing techniques developed for synthetic aperture radar may also be applied to synthetic aperture sonar (SAS). This paper discusses some of the factors in the design of a synthetic aperture sonar system, and to present some results from some trials carried out with a rail-mounted SAS system.