Shallow water beamforming methodology for toroidal volume search sonar

摘要

An apparatus and method for beamforming for a toroidal volume search sonar.onar array vehicle motion is used to reduce reverberation by fixing beams geometrically in space to prevent beam contact, prior to a specified range, with the sea surface or sea bottom interfaces. Reverberation is further reduced by creating a composite beam from one scanned beam containing the target dominated by surface reverberation and another dominated by bottom reverberation. A correlation and averaging procedure is applied to the two scanned beams to further reduce the reverberation in the composite beam. To further reduce reverberation, the two beams selected for correlation and averaging processing are chosen such that the number of common elements associated with the two beams is a minimum within a given angular separation.