Transmission of images through the underwater acoustic channel to submerged networks

As an acoustic communications medium, water is characterized by frequency dependent attenuation, short range, very low bandwidth, scattering, and multi-path. It is generally difficult to acoustically communicate even terse messages underwater much less images. For the naval mine countermeasures mission, there is value in transmitting images, if possible. The contribution of this paper is a methodology to encode, compress and transmit small (100s of kB) side-scan sonar images underwater with micromodems. The work has been validated through several at-sea trials. The reconstruction of the received images is of a fidelity that operators can visually recognize targets they normally look for in these images. Keywordsunderwater communications, transmission of sonar images underwater, image compression, image encoding