REAL-TIME SYNTHETIC-APERTURE SONAR IMAGING USING A PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE

This paper describes a parallel architecture that has been developed t o perform real-time synthetic aperture sonar imaging as part of the Ac oustical Imaging Development (ACID) project, The project has successfu lly developed a synthetic aperture sonar system for producing high res olution images of the sea door and that has been tested during a serie s of sea trials in May 1993 off the south coast of France. This paper describes the synthetic aperture processing system developed by the Un iversity of Newcastle upon Tyne and its use of transputer modules and associated devices in order to obtain real-time imaging performance, t he software structure of the processing system and the load balancing techniques that have been developed in order to provide efficient proc essing, The use of a parallel distributed architecture has also allowe d a processing system that can readily be extended to deliver greater computational power in the future. Images produced by the synthetic ap erture processor from data collected from around the Toulon coastal re gion are presented, These images highlight the improvement in azimuth resolution that can be obtained from synthetic aperture processing ove r conventional sidescan sonars.