Study on the long-distance target apperception techniques for underwater vehicles

The limited physical size for autonomous underwater vehicles （AUV） or unmanned underwater vehicles （UUV） makes it difficult to acquire enough space gain for localizing long-distance targets. A new technique about long-distance target apperception with passive synthetic aperture array for underwater vehicles is presented. First, a synthetic aperture-processing algorithm based on the FFT transform in the beam space （BSSAP） is introduced. Then, the study on the flank array passive long-distance apperception techniques in the frequency scope of 11-18 kHz is implemented from the view of improving array gains, detection probability and augmenting detected range under a certain sea environment. The results show that the BSSAP algorithm can extend the aperture effectively and improve detection probability. Because of the augment of the transmission loss, the detected range has the trend of decline with the increase of frequency under the same target source level. The synthesized array could improve the space gain by nearly 7 dB and SNR is increased by about 5 dB. The detected range is enhanced to nearly 2 km under the condition of 108-118 dB of the target source level for AUV system in measurement interval of nearly 1 s.

Array-error estimation method for multi-channel SAR systems in azimuth

For multi-channel synthetic aperture radar（SAR） systems, since the minimum antenna area constraint is eliminated,wide swath and high resolution SAR image can be achieved.However, the unavoidable array errors, consisting of channel gainphase mismatch and position uncertainty, significantly degrade the performance of such systems. An iteration-free method is proposed to simultaneously estimate position and gain-phase errors.In our research, the steering vectors corresponding to a pair of Doppler bins within the same range bin are studied in terms of their rotational relationships. The method is based on the fact that the rotational matrix only depends on the position errors and the frequency spacing between the paired Doppler bins but is independent of gain-phase error. Upon combining the projection matrices corresponding to the paired Doppler bins, the position errors are directly obtained in terms of extracting the rotational matrix in a least squares framework. The proposed method, when used in conjunction with the self-calibration algorithm, performs stably as well as has less computational load, compared with the conventional methods. Simulations reveal that the proposed method behaves better than the conventional methods even when the signal-to-noise ratio（SNR） is low.

Imaging process and signal-to-noise ratio improvement of enhanced self-heterodyne synthetic aperture imaging ladar

This Letter gives the general construction of an enhanced self-heterodyne synthetic aperture imaging ladar（SAIL） system, and proposes the principle of image processing. A point target is reconstructed in the enhanced self-heterodyne SAIL as well as in down-looking SAIL experiments, and the achieved imaging resolution of the enhanced self-heterodyne SAIL is analyzed. The signal-to-noise ratio（SNR） of the point target final image in the enhanced self-heterodyne SAIL is higher than that in the down-looking SAIL. The enhanced self-heterodyne SAIL can improve the SNR of the target image in far-distance imaging, with practicality.