A real-time object recognition for forward looking sonar

Automatic target recognition is a challenging task as the response from an underwater target may vary greatly depending on its configuration, sonar parameters and the environment. In forward looking sonar image the target is considered as composed of a few rows and columns of highlight pixels and a few rows and some columns of shadow pixels. We firstly design target-like templet for object in forward looking sonar, then correlation matching method is used for targets detection with the help of the target-like templet, at last the features which are extracted from the objects are used to get rid of the false objects. The algorithm is formulated for real-time execution on limited-memory commercial-of-the-shelf platforms and is capable of detection objects on the seabed-bottom.