Persistent scatterers detection from phase statistics of multi-view synthetic aperture sonar imaging

Persistent scatterers (PS) refer to stationary point reflectors that exhibit strong phase stability, irrespective of their amplitude. Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) systems provide high-resolution seafloor imaging by adding coherently the backscattered waves from multiple views along the synthetic antenna. Traditionally, PS detection relies on the magnitude of the resulting image, thus it is susceptible to high levels of speckle noise. This study demonstrates that PS can be detected more reliably from pixel-wise phase statistics of multi-view complex SAS images. Phase-based feature extraction aims to facilitate automatic target recognition tasks without training data.