Underwater viewing system

Abstract

An underwater viewing system described herein substantially reduces the number of hydrophones in the receiving array and associated circuitry by providing a plurality of transmitting transducers spaced apart by a known distance, each emitting a coded output which is normally a separate frequency. The receiving array, which is preferably square or rectangular, includes a substantial number of receiving hydrophones. A synthetic aperture technique is applied in which the reflected signal arriving at each individual hydrophone is amplified, modulated with a lower frequency reference signal, filtered, digitized and stored in a memory, preferably as part of a computer. The computer also compares each digitized hydrophone signal against sine and cosine reference signals at each frequency and performs a Fourier analysis of each row and column to reconstruct a primary image. It also computes spatial modulation through complex multiplication, addition and subtraction and, through this, reconstructs adjacent images for each transducer frequency such that the ultimate image synthesized and displayed is one in which the effective number of image points is like that of a system in which the number of hydrophones is the actual number multiplied by the number of different transmitted frequencies.