A 3D GAN Architecture for Volumetric Synthetic Aperture Sonar

Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) is used extensively in underwater imaging for visualizing the seafloor and objects present on it. However, processing SAS images can be time-consuming and tedious, with machine learning techniques being ineffective due to the lack of available data. In particular, automated target recognition (ATR) with 3D SAS data for machine learning is challenging in many ways due to the complexity with working with 3D volumetric data. Recently, researchers have introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) to help perform 2D SAS image generation for data augmentation. Following this line of work in this paper, we introduce a 3D-GAN architecture to generate photorealistic 3D SAS data which matches the fidelity of real data. In particular, we discuss novel latent space sampling and normalization to help 3D GANs overcome mode collapse for generating volumetric SAS information. Experimental results are shown on real 3D SAS data, showing the potential of using 3D GANs for dataset augmentation in the future.