A real-time adaptive bottom tracking method for bathymetric side-scan sonar

The performance of the existing bottom tracking method is affected by the seabed model, threshold, computation, etc. The bathymetric side-scan sonar (BSS) cannot accurately detect and extract the seabed in real time, which will cause the problems such as side-scan image distortion, the bathymetric image produces false targets or lost targets, etc. Based on the imaging mechanism of BSS and seabed continuity, a real-time adaptive bottom tracking method for BSS is proposed. Considering the relationship between the relative value, absolute value and maximum value of the seabed echo energy, the real-time bottom tracking of seabed in complex environment is realized by using a sliding window to segment the seabed echo and correcting the seabed abnormal points through the approximate invariance of the physical characteristics of the seabed topography. Theoretical simulations and experiments show that the proposed method can adaptively adjust the threshold parameter compared with the existing method, has less computational complexity, and has better automatic tracking performance.