Theoretical performance and experimental results for synthetic aperture sonar self-calibration

The paper deals with the methods exploiting the ping-to-ping correlation of the random wave signals from sea bottom backscattering in order to perform synthetic aperture self-calibration. The Cramer-Rao lower bounds for the propagation time delay and the array rotation between two successive pings, estimated in these methods, and the related upper bound for the resolution gain of the synthetic aperture processing are derived. Examples of synthetic aperture images from a ROV-mounted sonar, where the resolution gain values on the order of 10 are in good agreement with the previous theoretical performance, are shown.