Synthetic Aperture Imaging and Autofocus with Coherent Mimo Sonar Systems

MIMO stands for Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs. Such systems have received a lot of interests in the radar community during the last decade1 . One of the main reason behind this is the greater variety in terms of target view angles compared with traditional monostatic systems. With several independent views one can hope to reduce the speckle effect typical of coherent sensor systems such as RADAR or SONAR. Destructive interference in particular can be the cause of missed detection. MIMO sonar systems have been studied by the ASW2,3 (anti-submarine warfare) community mainly to increase the probability of detection of low strength target. Few MIMO systems have been built and tested including DEMUS (LF SIMO system built by CMRE). In any case all those systems use a relatively low number of sensors.