Large MIMO sonar systems: a tool for underwater surveillance

Multiple Input Multiple Output sonar systems offer new perspectives for target detection and underwater surveillance. In this paper we present an unified formulation for sonar MIMO systems and study their properties in terms of target recognition and imaging. Here we are interested in large MIMO systems. The multiplication of the number of transmitters and receivers non only provides a greater variety in term of target view angles but provides also in a single shot meaningful statistics on the target itself. We demonstrate that using large MIMO sonar systems and with a single shot it is possible to perform automatic target recognition and also to achieve superresolution imaging. Assuming the view independence between the MIMO pairs the speckle can be solved and individual scatterers within one resolution cell decorelate. A realistic 3D MIMO sonar simulator is also presented. The output of this simulator will demonstrate the theoretical results.