Geometric Correction Method of Side-scan Sonar Image

In recent decades, side-scan sonar technology has been used for underwater surveying, and its applications include marine mapping, shipwreck salvage, target detection, geological exploration and etc. Side-scan sonar is usually equipped on AUV. According to the imaging principle of side-scan sonar, besides the dynamic change of AUV heading, the speed and attitude instability will also cause geometric distortion of the side-scan sonar image. Therefore, it is necessary to correct the side-scan sonar image before further processing it. In this paper, we study on the side-scan sonar image geometric correction method including slant range correction and speed correction. Analyzing the limitations of the slant range correction method mentioned in the existing literature, we proposes an improved method by establishing a correction model. Secondly, We use GPS information from sonar data to correct the influence of side-scan sonar image caused by the change of AUV speed. At last, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments.