Comparison of Prescreening Algorithms for Target Detection in Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imagery

Automated anomaly and target detection are commonly used as a prescreening step within a larger target detection and target classification framework to find regions of interest for further analysis. A number of anomaly and target detection algorithms have been developed in the literature for application to target detection in Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imagery. In this paper, a comparison of two anomaly and one target detection algorithm for target detection in synthetic aperture sonar is presented. In the comparison, each method is tested on a large set of real sonar imagery and results are evaluated using receiver operating characteristic curves. The results are compiled and quantitatively shown to highlight the strengths and weakness of the variety of approaches within various sea-floor environments and on particular target shapes and types.