• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.3E
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• pp.77-83
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• 2008

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.

• 한국해양학회지
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.143-152
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• 1987

The digital data were obtained using Kennedy 9000 magnetic tape deck which was connected to the SMS960 side scan sonar during the field operations. The data of three consecutive survey tracks near Seongsan-po, Cheju were used for the development of this study. The softwares were mainly written in Fortran-77 using VAX 11/780 MINI-COMPUTER (CPU Memory; 4MB). The established mapping system consists of the pretreatment and the digital processing of seafloor image data. The pretreatment was necessary because the raw digital data format of the field magnetic tapes was not compatible to the VAX system. Therefore the raw data were read by the personal computer using the Assembler language and the data format was converted to IBM compatible, and next data were communicated to the VAX system. The digital processing includes geometrical correction for slant range, statistical analysis and cartography of the seafloor image. The sound speed in the water column was assumed 1,500 m/sec for the slant range correction and the moving average method was used for the signal trace smoothing. Histograms and cumulative curves were established for the statistical analysis, that was purposed to classify the backscattering strength from the sea-bottom. The seafloor image was displayed on the color screen of the TEKTRONIX 4113B terminal. According to the brief interpretation of the result image map, rocky and sedimentary bottoms were very well discriminated. Also it was shown that the backscattered acoustic pressurecorrelateswith the grain size and sorting of surface sediments.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.64 no.7
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• pp.1081-1087
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• 2015

Recently, the researches of aerial drones are actively executed in various areas, the researches of surface drones and underwater drones are also executed in marine areas. In case of surface drones, they essentially utilize acoustic information by the sonar and consequently have the local information in the obstacle avoidance as the sonar has the limitations due to the beam width and detection range. In order to overcome this, more global method that utilizes optical images by the camera is required. Related to this, the aerial drone with the camera is desirable as the obstacle detection of the surface drone with the camera is impossible in case of the existence of clutters. However, the dynamic-floating aerial drone is not desirable for the long-term operation as its power consumption is high. To solve this problem, a collaborative obstacle avoidance method based on the acoustic information by the sonar of the surface drone and the optical image by the camera of the static-floating aerial drone is proposed. To verify the performance of the proposed method, the collaborative obstacle avoidances of a MSD(Micro Surface Drone) with an OAS(Obstacle Avoidance Sonar) and a BMAD(Balloon-based Micro Aerial Drone) with a camera are executed. The test results show the possibility of real applications and the need for additional studies.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.161-167
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• 2019

In this paper, the performance verification of an around-view sonar and an excavation depth measuring sonar applicable to track-based ROVs (Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles) for heavy duty work is studied. For the performance verification, an experiment is carried out in a water tank and at sea by attaching the around-view sonar and the excavation depth measuring sonar for a heavy work ROV. In the case of the around-view sonar, image sonars are mounted on ROV in four directions (front, back, left and right) and in the case of the excavation depth measuring sonar, the same kind of MBES (Multi Beam Echo Sounder) is mounted on the front of the ROV. The result of an operation test of the ROV equipped with these sonars shows that the sonar systems are rarely affected by high turbidity due to sedimentation during the operation. In the case of the around-view sonar, it is possible to see rock formation, gravel and sandbank 30 m ahead of the ROV. It is confirmed that the excavation depth can be measured after the ROV has performed the excavation. This experiment demonstrates that the ROV can improve the efficiency of the work by utilizing the around-view sonar and the excavation depth measuring sonar.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.330-335
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• 2017

This study applied SONAR(Sound Navigation And Ranging) to the inspection and evaluation of underwater structures. Anactual river bridge was chosen for inspection and evaluation. SONAR and an optical camera were operated together to analyze the underwater image of the bridge. SONAR images were obtained by various methods to remove the environmental variables from the field experiment, and it was confirmed that the reliability of detecting damaged areas on piers was decreased when using SONAR alone. The SONAR equipment and the optical camera can be used simultaneously to overcome the limitations of SONAR in inspecting underwater structures.These results can be used as basic data for the development of similar technologies for underwater structure inspection.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.218-225
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• 2011

Dual frequency identification sonar (DIDSON) is an imaging sonar that has been used for numerous fisheries investigations in a diverse range of freshwater and marine environments. The main purpose of DIDSON is fish counting, fish sizing, and fish behavioral studies. DIDSON records video-quality data, so processing power for handling the vast amount of data with high speed is a priority. Therefore, a semiautomated analysis of DIDSON data for fish counting, sizing, and fish behavior in Echoview (fisheries acoustic data analysis software) was accomplished using testing data collected on the Rakaia River, New Zealand. Using this data, the methods and algorithms for background noise subtraction, image smoothing, target (fish) detection, and conversion to single targets were precisely illustrated. Verification by visualization identified the resulting targets. As a result, not only fish counts but also fish sizing information such as length, thickness, perimeter, compactness, and orientation were obtained. The alpha-beta fish tracking algorithm was employed to extract the speed, change in depth, and the distributed depth relating to fish behavior. Tail-beat pattern was depicted using the maximum intensity of all beams. This methodology can be used as a template and applied to data from BlueView two-dimensional imaging sonar.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.12-20
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• 2018

Efforts have been made to reconstruct low-resolution underwater images to high-resolution ones by using the image SR (Super-Resolution) method, all to improve efficiency when acquiring side-scan sonar images. As side-scan sonar images are similar with the optical images with respect to exploiting 2-dimensional signals, conventional image restoration methods for optical images can be considered as a solution. One of the most typical super-resolution methods for optical image is a sparse coding and there are studies for verifying applicability of sparse coding method for underwater images by analyzing sparsity of underwater images. Sparse coding is a method that obtains recovered signal from input signal by linear combination of dictionary and sparse coefficients. However, it requires huge computational load to accurately estimate sparse coefficients. In this study, a sparse coding based underwater image super-resolution method is applied while a selective reconstruction method for object region is suggested to reduce the processing time. For this method, this paper proposes an edge detection and object and non object region classification method for underwater images and combine it with sparse coding based image super-resolution method. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by reducing the processing time for image reconstruction over 32 % while preserving same level of PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) compared with conventional method.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.8-15
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• 2020

This research is a case study of underwater object tracking based on real-time recurrent regression networks (Re³). Re³ has the concept of generic object tracking. Because of these characteristics, it is very effective to apply this model to unclear underwater sonar images. The model also an pursues object tracking method, thus it solves the problem of calculating load that may be limited when object detection models are used, unlike the tracking models. The model is also highly intuitive, so it has excellent continuity of tracking even if the object being tracked temporarily becomes partially occluded or faded. There are 4 types of the dataset using multi-beam sonar images: including (a) dummy object floated at the testbed; (b) dummy object settled at the bottom of the sea; (c) tire object settled at the bottom of the testbed; (d) multi-objects settled at the bottom of the testbed. For this study, the experiments were conducted to obtain underwater sonar images from the sea and underwater testbed, and the validity of using noisy underwater sonar images was tested to be able to track objects robustly.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.121-129
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• 2021

This paper deals with a super-resolution that improves the resolution of side scan sonar images using learning-based compressive sensing. Learning-based compressive sensing combined with deep learning and compressive sensing takes a structure of a feed-forward network and parameters are set automatically through learning. In particular, we propose a method that can effectively extract additional information required in the super-resolution process through various initialization methods. Representative experimental results show that the proposed method provides improved performance in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) than conventional methods.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2013

To analyze the distribution pattern of flood sediment deposits near the mouth of Chucheoncheon (river), side scan sonar images and seafloor sediment properties were investigated in the offshore area within about 50 m deep in water. Based on the analysis result of the sonar images, the seafloor of the study area is divided into three areas of basement, sandy-mud, and dispersed flood sediment. The colors of sonar images in each area are represented by dark black, light grey, and greyish black, respectively. The sediment composition in the grey black area shows 33.73% of gravel, 62.88% of sand, 3.37% of silt, and 0.02% of clay. On the other hand, the composition of the light grey area is 10.31% of sand, 56.42% of silt, and 33.27% of clay. Especially the sediment of the grey black area contains the considerable amount of burned plant fragments in black color, which could distinctly be differentiated from those in the offshore. The distribution pattern of the flood sediment deposits suggests that the land-originated detrital sediments seem to be transported from the Chucheon river into offshore along the shore rather than transversely. In conclusion, the longshore current of the study area is probably dominant to affect the spatial distribution of bottom features.