Investigation on beamforming solution for multi-receiver synthetic aperture sonar using CW pulse with sound velocity profiles in Vietnam’s sea

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel beamforming solution for multi-receiver synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which uses gated continuous-wave (CW) pulses, based on the average value of equivalent sound velocity (ESV) when considering the change of the sound velocity with depth. The main beam can be steered to desirable positions with the proposed solution. Besides, the computation time for the phase distribution from the proposed solution reduces compared with the conventional solution by dividing the propagation trajectory into straight lines, where the sound velocity is unchanged. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated and evaluated by the results of the beam pattern and the time for determining the phase distribution with the sound velocity profiles (SVPs) in Vietnam’s sea.