A New Synthetic Aperture Sonar Design with Multipath Mitigation

Sonar performance in shallow water is severely degraded by multipath which reduces image contrast and degrades the performance of interferometric processing. This is an important limitation for high resolution applications such as minehunting, where target recognition exploits chiefly the shape and size of the target shadow. Experimental data showing the nature and importance of the multipath is presented together with a new sonar design, optimized to achieve a high level of multipath rejection at large range to water depth ratio.