A new way of identifying buried objects

Underwater object identification is of great interest to acousticians (detection of boulders), marines (detection of buried mines), or archaeologists (detection of wreckage). Image and signal processing succeed in identifying objects lying on the sea bottom, however identification of an object buried in sediment remains complex. The purpose of this work is to propose a complete identification of objects embedded in the sediment using an adapted technology. They use a parametric source, the properties of which are based on the water nonlinear propagation characteristics; it has many advantages as an acoustic source (high relative bandwidth, narrow beam) which are useful for object detection and classification. This paper presents a procedure which computes discriminant parameters from images to classify these objects.