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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Sonar image processing for underwater object detection based on high resolution system</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Imen Mandhouj, Hamid Amiri</string-name>
          <email>Imen.mandhouj@gmail.com</email>
          <email>Imen.mandhouj@gmail.com, hamidlamiri@yahoo.com</email>
          <email>hamidlamiri@yahoo.com</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Frederic Maussang, Basel Solaiman</string-name>
          <email>{Frederic.maussang;Basel.Solaiman}@telecombretagne.eu</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>ENST Bretagne, ITI laboratory</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Technopole Brest-Iroise, 29238 Brest Cedex</addr-line>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Systems and Signal Processing (LSTS) Laboratory, National School of Engineering of Tunis</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>ENIT</addr-line>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>-This paper is concerned with the problem of recognition of objects laying on the sea-bed and presented on sonar images. Considering that high resolution sonar system provides acoustic images of high-quality, several researches have been interested in Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) and Sides can sonar images for underwater objects. This work presents recent detection algorithms targeting their main specificity and innovations during the different steps of sonar image processing.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>-component</kwd>
        <kwd>objects recognition</kwd>
        <kwd>high-quality system</kwd>
        <kwd>image processing</kwd>
        <kwd>sonar image</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>INTRODUCTION</p>
      <p>
        Thanks to advances in digital electronics, many new
sonar systems have appeared. Today we found out the
acoustic camera, interferometric sonar, synthetic aperture
sonar (SAS), the synthesis incoherent sonar, parametric
sonar, Side scan sonar, etc [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. Sonar image obtained from
such sonar instruments are used in different fields to realize
seafloor task, such as navigation, seabed mapping, fishing,
ocean drilling barrier, oil exploration, mines’ detection, and
so on [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        In view of the interest in the field of mining since
hispanic times and nowadays, several research studies have
been interested in the mining and have been developed for
the detection of underwater mines using high-frequency
system. Both sides can sonar and Synthetic Aperture Sonar
(SAS) technologies provide high-resolution imagery for
mine hunting application. As they are characterized by their
very high performance resolution, images provided by SAS
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] and sides can sonar are of great interest for the detection
and classification of objects lying on the seabed or buried in
the sediment, and mainly, the underwater mines[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ][
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. In the
context of mine warfare, detected objects can be classified
from their cast shadow or their high intensity reflection of
the wave on the object. So several studies have been
developed within this context and are differentiated by their
approaches and methods used to obtain the search object
within the sonar image. But for the reason of the complexity
of oceanic environment and the particular optical properties
of light in water, the sonar image obtained from sonar
instrument is polluted by the noise. Therefore, it became an
important research field to remove the noise of sonar image
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ] before the application of various approaches of image
processing. Furthermore, according to the operated
approach, pre-or post-processing are generally used to make
each step of processing more robust [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Thus, from the
preprocessing to the classification process, recent
approaches present certain variability that we will explain in
this work still within the context of sonar image processing
for the underwater objects detection using high frequency
systems.
      </p>
      <p>This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, various
methods of pre-processing sonar images are represented. In
Section III, the principle, the utility and the different recent
approaches of sonar image textural analysis are cited.
Finally, different segmentation and classification methods
for underwater objects are represented in Section IV.</p>
      <p>II.</p>
      <p>SONAR IMAGE PRE-PROCESSING METHODS</p>
      <p>
        Because of the particular optical properties of light in
water and the presence of suspended particles, sonar images
are very noisy, the lighting is not uniform, the colors are
muted and the contrast is low. Most methods dedicated to
reduce the noise apply different filtering and are often
classified in two categories: the methods acting in the spatial
domain and those acting in the transformed domain.
Stéphane Bazeille and Isabelle Quidu [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] proposed an
algorithm for image preprocessing sonar which allows
correction of lighting, noise and color and requires no user
intervention or a priori information on the acquisition
conditions. This algorithm is a combination of four different
filters each of which aims to revise a special defect. To
eliminate the defects of non-uniformity of illumination, the
Homomorphic filtering is used. Sonar image is decomposed
into the reflectance factor and the illumination intensity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]
using the following equation:
g(x,y)=i(x,y).r(x,y).
(1)
g(x,y) is the sonar image,
i(x, y) is the multiplication factor of illumination and r(x, y)
is the reflectance function. Applied Homomorphic filtering
algorithm is summed up in the following steps:
      </p>
      <p>Separation of the components of illumination and
reflectance using the log of the image in (2):
g(x, y) = In f(x, y) = In i(x, y). r(x, y) =</p>
      <p>In(i(x, y) ) + In(r(x, y) ).</p>
      <p>Evaluation of Fourier transform of the log-image.
The resulting equation is as follows :
   ,</p>
      <p>=    ,   +    ,   .</p>
      <p>High-pass filtering of the Fourier transform: use of the
H modified Gaussian filter :</p>
      <p>G wx , wy =
H wx , wy . I wx , wy + H wx , wy . R wx , wy .</p>
      <p>Where
 wx , wy = (rH − rL). (1 − wx exp − w2x2∗+δ2wwy2 )) + rL.
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
•
•
•
•
•
  and   are the maximum and minimum coefficients
of the filter and   is the factor determining the cutoff
frequency.</p>
      <p>Evaluations of inverse Fourier transform to return in the
spatial domain.</p>
      <p>Application of the exponential function to get the
filtered image.</p>
      <p>
        The effects of the application of this algorithm on a
sonar image captured by a SAS system are shown in Fig. 1.
The filtering process is then based on Fourier transform
and uses the ‘H’ modified Gaussian filter. On the other
hand, in order to attenuate noise acquisition, wavelet
transform is used. Indeed, various denoising methods act in
the wavelets domain. These methods have three steps: the
computation of a wavelet transform (WT), the filtering of
the detail wavelet coefficients and the computation of the
corresponding inverse WT (IWT) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Fig. 2 shows the
principle of the wavelet decomposition.
      </p>
      <p>
        A first category of denoising methods applied in the
wavelets domain is based on nonparametric techniques [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ]
and uses the hard or the soft thresholding filters. Stéphane
Bazeille and Isabelle Quidu [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]’s algorithm of reducing
noise acquisition is based on wavelet decomposition of the
image corrupted by white Gaussian noise using A. F.
Abdelmour and I. W. Selesnick’s orthogonal wavelet [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ].
In order to get an approximate value of the noise variance,
Donoho and Johnstone’s estimator is applied [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] using the
following estimator   :
  2 =
      </p>
      <p>(|  |) ².</p>
      <p>0.6745</p>
      <p>Where the   are the coefficients of diagonal details
wavelet at the finest scale.
Finally, to correct color mutation, the algorithm applied a
linear translation of RGB three histograms so as to equalize
their average.</p>
      <p>
        Other algorithms are developed in the same context. The
paper by Buades [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ] proposed denoising algorithm acting
in the spatial domain. The algorithm explained a very
modern non parametric denoising method based on
nonlocal (NL) averaging. The NL-means algorithm tries to take
advantage of the high degree of redundancy of the sonar
image and the value of pixel is estimated by the neighbors’
pixel value using the following equation:
   ( ) = ∑ ∈  ( ,  ) ( ).
(6)
(7)
For each pixel   , the weight β(i,j) depends on the
similarity between the pixels i and his neighbor j. And “I”
defines the set of alls “i” neighbors. The paper by Katkovnik
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] discussed a denoising method for the case of additive
noise in
a transform’s domain.
combined the local polynomial approximation (LPA) with
the maximum likelihood and quasi likelihood for the design
of nonlinear filters. Another excellent denoising method for
the case of transform’s domain makes the object of Argenti
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]. In their paper, algorithms proposed for noise reducing
used for estimation either a maximum a posteriori (MAP) or
a linear minimum
      </p>
      <p>
        mean square error (LMMSE) filtering
approach [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref40">40</xref>
        ].
coefficients of each band by calculating their fourth order
algorithm, a robust criterion must be specified to note the
overall quality of the image. Such a criterion is not yet
defined in the literature and is still the subject of several
searches. The performance of the proposed algorithm is
often evaluated by presenting the effect of pretreatment on
the next steps of sonar image processing and especially
segmentation.
      </p>
      <p>III.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>SONAR IMAGES TEXTURAL ANALYSIS</title>
      <p>
        The analysis of textured images plays an important role
in image processing, pattern recognition and particularly in
sonar images classification [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. There are different
methods of feature extraction for image processing cited in
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. As part of mine detection, the distinction between the
image of a mine and an object that physically resembles a
mine is very complex and is relied on the recognition in
shapes and textures. Ph. Blondel [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]’s study combined two
different advances in sidescan sonar applications [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref30">30</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
        ].
In fact, sidescan sonar images in particular, are
mainly
described by their tonal and textural properties. This method
of advanced image analysis has been developed and based
on the quantification and recognition of acoustic textures.
The method has been extensively calibrated and
groundtruthed in complex terrains. The algorithm implicated was
then
successfully
applied
to
the
detection
of
mines.
      </p>
      <p>
        H. Laanaya’s paper [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] presented a method of sonar image
classification based on the process of extracting knowledge
from data. In Previous Laayana’s works [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">25</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ]
methods for the extraction of textural attributes in images
upgrades
gray are
quite similar.
      </p>
      <p>
        The texture is early
characterized as the statistics of the response to scale-space
filters such as Gabor and wavelet analysis, co-occurrence
matrix [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33">33</xref>
        ] or multifractal descriptors [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref34">34</xref>
        ]. A co-occurrence
matrix is a NG * NG size matrix where NG is the number of
gray levels of the image. Haralick [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref35">35</xref>
        ] defined 14 texture
features from the co-occurrence matrix. In this work only
six parameters are used: homogeneity, contrast, entropy,
correlation, uniformity and directivity.
      </p>
      <p>The homogeneity in the  direction is given by:</p>
      <p>The correlation between the rows and columns of the
matrix is given by:
(12)
where   ,   ,   ,   represent respectively the averages
and standard deviations of the marginal distributions of
elements
of
co-occurrence
matrix.</p>
      <p>The directivity defined the existence of a preferred direction
of the texture and is computed by the following equation:</p>
      <p>The uniformity characterizes the proportion of the same
gray level and is given by:</p>
      <p>
        Once these parameters are evaluated, the following
parameters: energy, entropy and average are calculated in
each sub-image of wavelets decomposition. Also, for the
analysis of image texture, a Gabor filter bank (a set of
filters, each selecting a frequency and a particular angle in
the image) is applied. Those parameters extracted are thus
transformed by linear (principal component analysis PCA,
linear discriminant analysis DLA) or nonlinear (Curvilinear
Component Analysis CCA) extracting
methods and form
most
K.Imen’s
discriminating
papers
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]
parameters
      </p>
      <p>
        departure.
propose
a
new
region-based
segmentation of textured sonar images with respect to
seafloor types. Haralick’s parameters [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref35">35</xref>
        ], coefficients of
wavelet and Gabor are used as descriptors to characterize
seabed. The contribution of this method is that the choice of
descriptors is not randomly but based on techniques for
selection
of
parameters
and
attributes
of the
most
discriminating textures. The selection problem is addressed
through the definition of a similarity measure adapted to the
characteristics of relevant textures towards a learning set of
textures. The (dis)-similarity between a seabed type T and
Tʶ texture is calculated in (15) using the Kullback-Leibler
divergence (KL) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref41">41</xref>
        ]:
  (−)   ,   ( ) + ∑ =1 ∑ =1   2
      </p>
      <p>, 
  ( ) . (15)

= ∑ =1 ∑
 
 =1   2 ( ,  ).
level’s image.</p>
      <p>is the correlation matrix, whereas NG is the gray
(8)
(10)
(11)
(13)
(14)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>The estimated contrast is given by:</title>
      <p>The entropy in   is defined by:
=</p>
      <p>1 ∑  −1
  −1  =0  2 ∑ 
 , =1,| − |=</p>
      <p>
        ( ,  ).
= 1 − ∑ =1 ∑
 
 =1   ( ,  )log(  ( ,  )).
Once the proposed approach based on texture analysis
gives the textural features, an application to sonar texture
classification is addressed. Nevertheless, when the approach
of detecting underwater objects is not based on texture
features, the classification step is realized by exploring other
paths of segmentation.
underwater objects mainly a mine are cited in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. Many
segmentation methods are based on statistical model using
first and second order statistics [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28">28</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ]. Frederic’s work
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ] presented a new
      </p>
      <p>
        method of underwater mine echoes
detection. Segmentation echoes step is based at first on
using local statistical proprieties of sonar images. Higher
Order Statistics (HOS) are then used to improve detection
tool [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. The first and second order statistics have served to
a mean-standard
deviation representation.
      </p>
      <p>
        Kurtosis and
Skewness are evaluated on a square window for each pixel
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref32">32</xref>
        ] to obtain correct location of the echoes of detected
objects. As a test of Frederic’s algorithm, the case of sonar
image presented in Fig. 3 is taken. Corresponding mean–
standard deviation representation is presented in Fig. 4. In
this figure we show the result of three tests realized in order
to segment the test image using [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ] the first and second
image’s local statistical proprieties. For each of three
calculation
proportionality
window,
the
      </p>
      <p>dashed
coefficient between
line
mean
represents</p>
      <p>the
and
standard
deviation (estimated with the
Weibull law), and the solid
lines feature the threshold values.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>On each calculation window, the expression of</title>
      <p>Skewness (16) and Kurtosis (17) is given as a function of
the proportion of pixels in the deterministic calculation
window ( ) and the signal to noise ratio (p) as follows:
  ( ,  ) =

1−
(1−2 ) 3−33 .</p>
      <p>(  2+1)2

  ( ,  ) = 1− (1−6 +6 2) 4−6(1−2 ) 2+3
.
(  2+1)2
(16)
(17)
types of mine: a spherical (placed in the left end of the image) and a
second practically buried in the bottom (placed in the right end).</p>
      <p>Mean–standard deviation representation of the test image.</p>
      <p>This representation is built with a 3 x 3 window size in figure (a), 5 x 5 in</p>
      <p>To automate the segmentation algorithm, the standard
deviation threshold value is evaluated using the entropy
criterion. The entropy value is calculated on each axis of the
image
using
the</p>
      <p>Shannon
formula
as
follows:
 
= − ∑ ∈  
( )
2  
( ).</p>
      <p>(18)
Where</p>
      <p>( ) is the number of segmented pixels in the
column i (respectively line i), and “I” is the set of columns
(respectively lines).</p>
      <p>
        This method is finally tested on real SAS data containing
underwater and other objects, laying on the seabed or buried
on
the
seafloor
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        The test of the segmentation method on the test SAS
image and the value of entropy calculated for each axis
using the above equation
are
presented in Fig. 5.
contribution of the proposed method is the use of the belief
functions theory for the combination of binary classifiers
coming from the SVM. The modelization of the basic belief
assignments is then evaluated directly from the decision
functions given by the SVM. Additionally, the approach
proposed in Laayana’s paper [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] aims to make first robust
traditional classification methods, such as support vector
machines or k-nearest neighbors then apply evidential and
fuzzy SVM for regression. For finding the SVM’s hyper
plane, the proposed method uses one of two approaches
oneagainst-one or approach one-against-rest. The choice of the
k nearest neighbors is labeled by a set distance. The
individual are then placed in the class to which belongs the
greatest K number of neighbors. Another proposed approach
to integrate the concept of fuzzy in SVM is to model the
noise on the inputs by weighting. For the evaluation of
classification approaches exploited, [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] adopts the result of
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref36">36</xref>
        ] work. The comparison between the different classifiers
showed that SVM gives the best classification rate. Later
Isabelle Leblond and Isabelle Quidu propose an original
strategy to classify underwater objects from SAS images
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref39">39</xref>
        ]. The method proposed in this work allows classifying
an object from multiple views via a prediction of the new
angle of visit for the additional views in order to take off the
ambiguities on the classification. The classification
algorithm is presented in Fig. 6 as a chain of transactions
whose extent is based on the results of the previous step.
      </p>
      <p>The first operation consists in the classification of the
sonar image using the method of K-nearest neighbor applied
to the result of the ACP presentation in the plane of the
object. In case where an additional view must be chosen, the
prediction step is performed. This primary step is to estimate
the orientation of the object and then propose the angle of
his next visit. The choice of the new direction is then based
on the estimated angle and the defined rules. These rules
specific to each type of mine are well defined for the case of
mine and cylinder Rockan mine and also in the case of a
general class mine. Performance evaluation of the method is
evaluated by calculating two parameters: "rate of correct
identification" and "false alarm rate" from the confusion
matrix. On the strategy using the predictive phase in the
method presented, results are generally considered of high
performance for both parameters calculated.</p>
      <p>Generally, in order to show the contribution of the
proposed method, classification approach is compared with
classification on the same data, but using other strategies.</p>
      <p>The focus of this paper is the study of the invariant
approaches for sonar objects detection with application to
high frequency sonar system images. This paper explained
considerable recent work to underwater objects detection
but also it presented a few of previous work in the same
filed in order to establish the mutation of accurate method.
Several research studies for detection approach turn to apply
different methods of image processing including filtering,
segmentation and objects’ classification and involved, in the
case of need, other technologies (principal component
analysis, fusion methods, fuzzy estimation…). It is generally
difficult to make comparison between different recognition
algorithms, even for the same filed, since different test sets
are used to evaluate performance. In fact, to validate the
performance of each proposed algorithm, some works
challenge to define a criterion that it considers robust to note
the overall quality of the image. Other works make a
comparison with previous results applied on the same sonar
data.</p>
      <p>Thanks to their diversity, many novel approaches are the
result of a simple combination of two or more existing
methods. However, more work is needed to understand a
number of important factors which typically affect the sonar
data.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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