Automatic Detection of Underwater Objects in Sonar Imagery

This paper introduces a new unsupervised statistically-based algorithm for the detection of underwater objects in sonar imagery. Highlights are detected by a higher-order-statistics representation of the image followed by a segmentation process to form a region-of-interest (ROI). Our algorithm sets its main parameters in situ and avoids the need of parameter calibration. Moreover, we do not require knowledge about the target's shape or size, thereby making our algorithm robust to any sonar detection application. Results obtained from real sonar system show a good trade-off between probability of detection and false alarm rate (FAR).