Despite the rapidly reducing cost of DSP technology and other digital electronics, the cost of multibeam sonar systems remains very high. This is largely due to large receiving arrays (typically 100-200 channels) each with transducer, amplifier/filters and ADC. The power consumption of such complex systems is also a problem for battery operated systems such as AUVs. This paper describes novel work to investigate if such imaging can be achieved with an "ultra-sparse array" of no more than 4 elements, exploiting the broad bandwidth provided by modern piezo-composite transducers which can far exceed range resolution requirements.
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