2D Forward Looking Sonar Simulation with Ground Echo Modeling

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for simulating ground echo effects in 2D forward looking sonar images, addressing multi-path reflections to improve underwater sonar image realism for robotics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a physical simulation approach for ground echo effects, modeling multi-bounce reflections efficiently within sonar image simulation.

Findings

Synthetic images closely match real water tank images

The method effectively models multi-bounce ground echoes

Improves realism of sonar simulations for underwater robotics

Abstract

Imaging sonar produces clear images in underwater environments, independent of water turbidity and lighting conditions. The next generation 2D forward looking sonars are compact in size and able to generate high-resolution images which facilitate underwater robotics research. Considering the difficulties and expenses of implementing experiments in underwater environments, tremendous work has been focused on sonar image simulation. However, sonar artifacts like multi-path reflection were not sufficiently discussed, which cannot be ignored in water tank environments. In this paper, we focus on the influence of echoes from the flat ground. We propose a method to simulate the ground echo effect physically in acoustic images. We model the multi-bounce situations using the single-bounce framework for computation efficiency. We compare the real image captured in the water tank with the synthetic images to validate the proposed methods.