Title: A New Framework for Synthetic Aperture Sonar Micronavigation,
Abstract: Synthetic aperture imaging systems achieve constant azimuth resolution by
coherently summating the observations acquired along the aperture path. At this
aim, their locations have to be known with subwavelength accuracy. In
underwater Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS), the nature of propagation and
navigation in water makes the retrieval of this information challenging.
Inertial sensors have to be employed in combination with signal processing
techniques, which are usually referred to as micronavigation. In this paper we
propose a novel micronavigation approach based on the minimization of an error
function between two contiguous pings having some mutual information. This
error is obtained by comparing the vector space intersections between the pings
orthogonal projectors. The effectiveness and generality of the proposed
approach is demonstrated by means of simulations and by means of an experiment
performed in a controlled environment.