On the use of higher order statistics in SAS imagery

Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imagery is largely used in de-tection, location and classification of underwater mines laying or buried in the sea bed. This paper proposes a detection method us-ing Higher Order Statistics (HOS) on SAS images. The proposed method can be divided into two steps. Firstly, the HOS (Skewness and Kurtosis) are locally estimated using a square sliding compu-tation window. In a second step, the results are focused by a cor-relation process. This enables the precise location of the objects. This method is tested on real SAS data containing both underwater mines laying on the sea bed and buried objects. 1