SAS Simulations with Procedural Texture and the Point-based Sonar Scattering Model

Recent work has demonstrated the efficacy of Procedural Techniques for simulation of realistic textures emulating rippled-sand and random roughness seafloors, as well as bioturbation by fish feeding pits. Separately, recent work has presented a sonar time series model, which has been shown to agree with theory for the mean, mean square, and spatial coherence of the roughness-scattered acoustic field. In this work, we apply these state of the art environmental generation techniques, inspired by the computer graphics industry, for generation of realistic seafloor textures, combined with the massive parallelization afforded by modern graphics processing units to compute acoustic models, for generation of simulated sonar time series. The resulting time series are then demonstrated to be suitable for coherent synthetic aperture signal processing resulting in a high-fidelity simulated SAS image.