• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.225-233
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• 2024

Active sonar transmits sound waves to detect covertly maneuvering underwater objects and detects the signals reflected back from the target. However, in addition to the target's echo, the active sonar's received signal is mixed with seafloor, sea surface reverberation, biological noise, and other noise, making target recognition difficult. Conventional techniques for detecting signals above a threshold not only cause false detections or miss targets depending on the set threshold, but also have the problem of having to set an appropriate threshold for various underwater environments. To overcome this, research has been conducted on automatic calculation of threshold values through techniques such as Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) and application of advanced tracking filters and association techniques, but there are limitations in environments where a significant number of detections occur. As deep learning technology has recently developed, efforts have been made to apply it in the field of underwater target detection, but it is very difficult to acquire active sonar data for discriminator learning, so not only is the data rare, but there are only a very small number of targets and a relatively large number of non-targets. There are difficulties due to the imbalance of data. In this paper, the image of the energy distribution of the detection signal is used, and a classifier is learned in a way that takes into account the imbalance of the data to distinguish between targets and non-targets and added to the existing technique. Through the proposed technique, target misclassification was minimized and non-targets were eliminated, making target recognition easier for active sonar operators. And the effectiveness of the proposed technique was verified through sea experiment data obtained in the East Sea.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.429-439
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• 2014

The target echoes contain information on the target such as the orientation, kinematics, and internal structure, as well as the external geometrical shape of the target. In addition, the pattern of the target echoes depends on the arrangement of the transmitters and receivers in space. Therefore, the study of the target echoes in a multi-static SONAR system can be useful for detecting and tracking submerged objects using an underwater surveillance system. For this purpose, an acoustic measuring system for multi-static target echoes was designed and tested in an acoustic water tank. Some preliminary data are presented and discussed.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.305-313
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• 2024

For effective bi-static sonar operation, detection performance analysis must be performed reflecting the characteristics of sound propagation due to the ocean environment and target information. However, previous studies analyzing bistatic sonar detection performance have either not considered the ocean environment and target characteristics or have been conducted using simplified approaches. Therefore, in this study, we compared and analyzed the bistatic detection performance in Yellow sea and Ulleung basin both with and without considering target characteristics. A numerical analysis model was used to derive an accurate bistatic target strength for the submarine-shaped target, and signal excess was calculated by reflecting the simulated target strength. As a result, significant changes in detection performance were observed depending on the source and receiver locations as well as the target strength.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.33-39
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• 2017

In this paper, an effective feature which is capable of classifying targets among the detections obtained from 2D range-bearing maps generated in active sonar environments is proposed. Most conventional approaches for target classification with the 2D maps have considered magnitude of peak and statistical features of the area surrounding the peak. To improve the classification performance, HOG(Histogram of Gradient) feature, which is popular for their robustness in the image textures analysis is applied. In order to classify the target signal, SVM(Support Vector Machine) method with reduced HOG feature by the PCA(Principal Component Analysis) algorithm is incorporated. The various simulations are conducted with the real clutter signal data and the synthesized target signal data. According to the simulated results, the proposed method considering HOG feature is claimed to be effective when classifying the active sonar target compared to the conventional methods.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.330-336
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• 2021

In bistatic sonar operation, the scattering strength of a sonar target is characterized by the probe signal frequency, the aspect angle and the bistatic angle. Therefore, the target detection and identification performance of the bistatic sonar may vary depending on how the positions of the target, sound source, and receiver are changed during sonar operation. In this study, it was evaluated which variable is advantageous to change by comparing the target identification performance between the case of changing the aspect angle and the case of changing the bistatic angle during the operation. A scenario of identifying a hollow sphere and a cylinder was assumed, and performance was compared by classifying two targets with a support vector machine and comparing their accuracy using a finite element method-based acoustic scattering simulation. As a result of comparison, using the scattering strength defined by the frequency and the bistatic angle with the aspect angle fixed showed superior average classification accuracy. It means that moving the receiver to change the bistatic angle is more effective than moving the sound source to change the aspect angle for target identification.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.401-407
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• 2021

The continuous active sonar technology is effective for detecting and tracking targets because of short target revisiting rate. Generalized Sinusoidal Frequency Modulation (GSFM) pulses suitable for continuous active sonar systems are known to be capable of obtaining high time-bandwidth product while maintaining the orthogonality between pulses. However, it is unknown how to calculate an appropriate length of time to correlate received GSFM pulses in the presence of a target with acceleration. In this paper, we propose a method to calculate the appropriate time length based on the correlation when matching the received signal in the continuous active sonar system using GSFM pulse. The proposed method calculates the correlation according to the acceleration of the target and calculates the signal processing length according to the correlation. It is shown that stable detection performance can be obtained when the signal processing length calculated by the proposed method through the level of the sidelobe is applied.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.2505-2511
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• 2013

Many studies in detection and classification of the targets in the underwater environments have been conducted for military purposes, as well as for non-military purpose. Due to the complicated characteristics of underwater acoustic signal reflecting multipath environments and spatio-temporal varying characteristics, active sonar target classification technique has been considered as a difficult technique. And it has difficulties in collecting actual underwater data. In this paper, we synthesized active target echoes based on ray tracing algorithm using target model having 3-dimensional highlight distribution. Then, Fractional Fourier transform was applied to synthesized target echoes to extract feature vector. Recognition experiment was performed using neural network classifier.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.1083-1088
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• 2013

Detection and classification of undersea mines in shallow waters using active sonar returns is a difficult task due to complexity of underwater environment. Support vector machine(SVM) is a binary classifier that is well known to provide a global optimum solution. In this paper, classification experiments of sonar returns from mine-like objects and non-mine-like objects are carried out using the SVM, and classification performance is analyzed and presented with discussions depending on parameter values of SVM kernel functions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.8
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• pp.11-19
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• 2014

In recent SONAR (sound navigation and ranging) systems, wideband active SONAR systems has received more attention than narrowband SONAR systems due to the remarkable detection performance in terms of range resolution. However, the wideband SONAR systems usually requires a huge amount of computational burden in order to achieve their own superiority. To cope with this drawback of the wideband SONAR systems, this paper proposes a fast target detection and velocity estimation method using an extended replica in wideband hyperbolic frequency modulation active SONAR system. Computer simulation shows that the proposed method can be implemented by a highly reduced computational complexity with a little performance degradation in target detection and velocity estimation compared to the conventional filter bank method.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Marine Engineers Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.199-200
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• 2006

This paper describes how to generate stereoscopic sonar images by using multibeam data. Both parallel and crossing methods were used to create stereoscopic vision of the seafloor. Stereoscopic sonar images might provide reality and more detailed information of the target and the seafloor topography.