Radar and Sonar Imaging and Processing (2nd Edition)

The 14 papers (from 29 submitted) published in the Special Issue “Radar and Sonar Imaging Processing (2nd Edition)” highlight a variety of topics related to remote sensing with radar and sonar sensors. The sequence of articles included in the SI deal with a broad profile of aspects of the use of radar and sonar images in line with the latest scientific trends, in which the latest developments in science, including artificial intelligence, were used.

Fish Segmentation in Sonar Images by Mask R-CNN on Feature Maps of Conditional Random Fields

Imaging sonar systems are widely used for monitoring fish behavior in turbid or low ambient light waters. For analyzing fish behavior in sonar images, fish segmentation is often required. In this paper, Mask R-CNN is adopted for segmenting fish in sonar images. Sonar images acquired from different shallow waters can be quite different in the contrast between fish and the background. That difference can make Mask R-CNN trained on examples collected from one fish farm ineffective to fish segmentation for the other fish farms. In this paper, a preprocessing convolutional neural network (PreCNN) is proposed to provide “standardized” feature maps for Mask R-CNN and to ease applying Mask R-CNN trained for one fish farm to the others. PreCNN aims at decoupling learning of fish instances from learning of fish-cultured environments. PreCNN is a semantic segmentation network and integrated with conditional random fields. PreCNN can utilize successive sonar images and can be trained by semi-supervised learning to make use of unlabeled information. Experimental results have shown that Mask R-CNN on the output of PreCNN is more accurate than Mask R-CNN directly on sonar images. Applying Mask R-CNN plus PreCNN trained for one fish farm to new fish farms is also more effective.

Determination of the bottom scattering coefficient discontinuity lines in the multibeam ocean sounding

In this paper the problems of constructing sonar images of the seabed according to measurements of the multibeam side scan sonar are considered. The inverse problem for the non-stationary equation of radiation transfer with the diffuse reflection conditions at the boundary which consists in finding the discontinuity lines of the bottom scattering coefficient is investigated. A numerical algorithm for solving the inverse problem is developed, and an analysis of the quality of reconstructing the boundaries of inhomogeneities of the seabed is carried out, depending on the number of views and the width of a radiation pattern and the sounding range.

Application of spectral and spatial processing methods to sonar images

The paper proposes the use of the method of renormalization with limitation (MRL) for suppressing the speckle noise of images obtained using sonar. The method is tested on real images obtained by the interferometric side-view sonar. The principal possibility of a significant reduction in the speckle noise level is found due to the fact that the MRL renormalizes the spectrum of the sonar image to the universal reference spectrum (URS) model, which is a model of the spectrum of a "good" quality grayscale image. To increase the overall sharpness of the image, after applying the MRL, it is proposed to use spatial brightness transformations. The study allows us to conclude that the application of MRL to sonar images can significantly reduce speckle noise.

Physics-Based Modelling and Simulation of Multibeam Echosounder Perception for Autonomous Underwater Manipulation

One of the key distinguishing aspects of underwater manipulation tasks is the perception challenges of the ocean environment, including turbidity, backscatter, and lighting effects. Consequently, underwater perception often relies on sonar-based measurements to estimate the vehicle’s state and surroundings, either standalone or in concert with other sensing modalities, to support the perception necessary to plan and control manipulation tasks. Simulation of the multibeam echosounder, while not a substitute for in-water testing, is a critical capability for developing manipulation strategies in the complex and variable ocean environment. Although several approaches exist in the literature to simulate synthetic sonar images, the methods in the robotics community typically use image processing and video rendering software to comply with real-time execution requirements. In addition to a lack of physics-based interaction model between sound and the scene of interest, several basic properties are absent in these rendered sonar images–notably the coherent imaging system and coherent speckle that cause distortion of the object geometry in the sonar image. To address this deficiency, we present a physics-based multibeam echosounder simulation method to capture these fundamental aspects of sonar perception. A point-based scattering model is implemented to calculate the acoustic interaction between the target and the environment. This is a simplified representation of target scattering but can produce realistic coherent image speckle and the correct point spread function. The results demonstrate that this multibeam echosounder simulator generates qualitatively realistic images with high efficiency to provide the sonar image and the physical time series signal data. This synthetic sonar data is a key enabler for developing, testing, and evaluating autonomous underwater manipulation strategies that use sonar as a component of perception.

Real-Time Underwater Maritime Object Detection in Side-Scan Sonar Images Based on Transformer-YOLOv5

To overcome the shortcomings of the traditional manual detection of underwater targets in side-scan sonar (SSS) images, a real-time automatic target recognition (ATR) method is proposed in this paper. This method consists of image preprocessing, sampling, ATR by integration of the transformer module and YOLOv5s (that is, TR–YOLOv5s), and target localization. By considering the target-sparse and feature-barren characteristics of SSS images, a novel TR–YOLOv5s network and a down-sampling principle are put forward, and the attention mechanism is introduced in the method to meet the requirements of accuracy and efficiency for underwater target recognition. Experiments verified the proposed method achieved 85.6% mean average precision (mAP) and 87.8% macro-F2 score, and brought 12.5% and 10.6% gains compared with the YOLOv5s network trained from scratch, and had the real-time recognition speed of about 0.068 s per image.

Contour Extraction Based on Adaptive Thresholding in Sonar Images

A common problem in underwater side-scan sonar images is the acoustic shadow generated by the beam. Apart from that, there are a number of reasons impairing image quality. In this paper, an innovative algorithm with two alternative histogram approximation methods is presented. Histogram approximation is based on automatically estimating the optimal threshold for converting the original gray scale images into binary images. The proposed algorithm clears the shadows and masks most of the impairments in side-scan sonar images. The idea is to select a proper threshold towards the rightmost local minimum of the histogram, i.e., closest to the white values. For this purpose, the histogram envelope is approximated by two alternative contour extraction methods: polynomial curve fitting and data smoothing. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm produces superior results than popular thresholding methods and common edge detection filters, even after corrosion expansion. The algorithm is simple, robust and adaptive and can be used in automatic target recognition, classification and storage in large-scale multimedia databases.