Synthetic aperture sonar

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Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) is a form of sonar in which sophisticated post-processing of sonar data are used in ways closely analogous to synthetic aperture radar. Synthetic aperture sonars combine a number of acoustic pings to form an image with much higher resolution than conventional sonars, typically 10 times higher. The principle of synthetic aperture sonar is to move a sonar along a line and illuminate the same spot on the sea floor with several pings. This produces a synthetic array equal to the distance traveled. By coherent reorganization of the data from all the pings, a synthetic aperture image is produced with improved along-track resolution. SAS processing has the potential to improve the resolution by one order of magnitude compared to conventional side-scan sonars.