Software de procesado de imágenes procedentes de un sonar de barrido lateral en exploración submarina

Abstract

Digital images provided by onboard sidescan sonar in an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), are usually poor in their resolution. There are two commercial expensive solutions for this trouble: the first one is the use of high resolution multibeam sidescan sonar, the second one consists in the use of bathymetric sonar. It is evident that for spanish university these solutions exceeds the economical budget and needs a generous external support. This work shows an economical solution for this problem by using digital image processing techniques under MATLAB environment. Results are comparable in quality with the commercial expensive hardware solutions. The application presented here is easy to use and has been developed under “user friendly” philosophy and could be operated for users at any level. This work is the first step for future lines of work in underwater recognition of objects.