High-Frequency Acoustic Sediment Classification in Shallow Water

A geoacoustic inversion technique for high-frequency (12 kHz) multibeam sonar data is presented as a means to classify the seafloor sediment in shallow water (40–300 m). The inversion makes use of backscattered data at a variety of grazing angles to estimate mean grain size. The need for sediment type and the large amounts of multibeam data being collected with the Naval Oceanographic Office’s Simrad EM 121A systems, have fostered the development of algorithms to process the EM 121A acoustic backscatter into maps of sediment type. The APL-UW (Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington) backscattering model is used with simulated annealing to invert for six geoacoustic parameters. For the inversion, three of the parameters are constrained according to empirical correlations with mean grain size, which is introduced as an unconstrained parameter. The four unconstrained (free) parameters are mean grain size, sediment volume interaction, and two seafloor roughness parameters. Acoustic sediment classification is performed in the Onslow Bay region off the coast of North Carolina using data from the 12kHz Simrad EM 121A multibeam sonar system. Raw hydrophone data is beamformed into 122 beams with a 120-degree swath on the ocean floor, and backscattering strengths are calculated for each beam and for each ping. Ground truth consists of 68 grab samples in the immediate vicinity of the sonar survey, which have been analyzed for mean grain size. Mean grain size from the inversion shows 90% agreement with the ground truth and may be a useful tool for high-frequency acoustic sediment classification in shallow water.