Effective false alarm rejection for sea mine classification

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with a state-of-the-art SAS system can provide imagery of the underwater environment with resolution on the order of a centimeter while covering more than a square kilometer per hour. Attempting to perform underwater mine classification using multiple SAS views is a relatively immature area of research. The NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) previously investigated an approach based on finding the single highest maximum correlation between a set of views of a training shape and a testing shape. Several approaches can be used for fusing available target views. The first choice to be made is whether to combine the single-view images into one multi-view image or to treat the images separately. NURC recently developed a method to fuse several views into a single view using sonar inversion.