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Convolutional Autoencoding of Small Targets in the Littoral Sonar Acoustic Backscattering Domain
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Convolutional Autoencoding of Small Targets in the Littoral Sonar Acoustic Backscattering Domain

Timothy J. Linhardt, Ananya Sen Gupta and Matthew Bays
Journal of marine science and engineering, Vol.11(1), p.21
12/23/2022
DOI: 10.3390/jmse11010021
url
https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse11010021View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Automated target recognition is an important task in the littoral warfare domain, as distinguishing mundane objects from mines can be a matter of life and death. This is initial work towards the application of convolutional autoencoding to the littoral sonar space, with goals of disentangling the reflection noise prevalent in underwater acoustics and allowing recognition of the shape and material of targets. The autoencoders were trained on magnitude Fourier transforms of the TREX13 dataset. Clusters in the encoding space representing the known variable of measurement distance between the target and the sensor were found. An encoding vector space of around 16 dimensions appeared sufficient, and the space was shown to generalize well to unseen data.

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