Measurements of bubble size and distribution in the surface layer of the sea, wind speed, and variation of ocean environments were made continually over a four-day period in an experiment conducted in the South Sea of Korea during 17-20 September 2007. Theoretical background of bubble population model indicates that bubble population is a function of the depth, range and wind speed and bubble effects on sound speed shows that sound speed varies with frequency. Observational evidence exhibited that the middle size bubble population fit the model very well, however, smaller ones can not follow the model probably due to their short lifetime. Meanwhile, there is also a hysteresis effect of void fraction. Observational evidence also indicates that strong changes in sound speed are produced by the presence of swarms of micro bubbles especially from 7 kHz to 50 kHz, and calculation results are consistent with the measured data in the high frequency band, but inconsistent in the low frequency band. Based on the measurements of the sound speed and high frequency transmission configuration in the bubble layer, we present an estimation of underwater acoustic channel capacity in the bubble layer.

In the process of the sonar image textures produced, the orientation and scale factors are very significant. However, most of the related methods ignore the directional information and scale invariance or just pay attention to one of them. To overcome this problem, we apply Gabor wavelet to extract the features of sonar images, which combine the advantages of both the Gabor filter and traditional wavelet function. The mother wavelet is designed with constrained parameters and the optimal parameters will be selected at each orientation, with the help of bandwidth parameters based on the Fisher criterion. The Gabor wavelet can have the properties of both multi-scale and multi-orientation. Based on our experiment, this method is more appropriate than traditional wavelet or single Gabor filter as it provides the better discrimination of the textures and improves the recognition rate effectively. Meanwhile, comparing with other fusion methods, it can reduce the complexity and improve the calculation efficiency.

Displacement estimation is a crucial step in ultrasonic strain imaging. The displacement between a pre- and postcompression signal in the current data window is estimated by first shifting the postcompression signal by the displacement obtained in the previous data window to reduce their decorrelation and then determining the remaining part of the displacement through autocorrelation and conversion of phase difference into time delay. However, since strain image quality tends to vary with the amount of compression applied, we propose two new methods for enhancing strain image quality, i.e., displacement normalization and adaptive persistence. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments are carried out to acquire ultrasound data and produce strain images in real time under the application of quasi static compression. The experimental results demonstrate that the methods are quite effective in improving strain image quality and thus can be applied to implementing an ultrasound elasticity imaging system that operates in real time.

In this paper, the new hybrid adaptive Volterra filter was proposed to be applied for compensating the nonlinear distortion of memoryless nonlinear systems with saturation characteristics. Through computer simulations as well as the analytical analysis, it could be shown that it is possible for both conventional Volterra filter and proposed hybrid Volterra filter, to be applied for linearizing the memoryless nonlinear system with nonlinear distortion. Also, the simulations results demonstrated that the proposed hybrid filter may have faster convergence speed and better capability of compensating the nonlinear distortion than the conventional Volterra filter.

Recently, a method for robust time reversal focusing has been introduced to extend the period of stable focusing in time-dependent ocean environments [S. Kim et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 114, 145-157, (2003)]. In this study, concept of focal-size broadening based on waveguide invariant theory in an ocean time reversal acoustics is described. It is achieved by imposing the multiple location constraints. The signal vector used in multiple location constraints are found from the theory on waveguide invariant for frequency band corresponding the extended focal range. The broadening of foci in an ocean waveguide can play an important role in the application of time reversal processing, particularly to the underwater acoustic communication with moving vehicles. The proposed method is demonstrated in the context of the underwater acoustic communication from the transmit/receive array (TRA) to a slowly moving vehicle.