Target Angular Position Classification with Synthesized Active Sonar Signals

This letter deals with angular position classification using the synthesized active sonar returns from targets. For the synthesis of active sonar returns, we synthesized active sonar returns based on ray tracing algorithm for 3D highlight models. Then, a fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) was applied to the sonar returns to extract the angular position information depending on the target aspect by utilizing separation capability of the time-delayed combination of linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals in the FrFT domain. With the FrFT-based features, three different target angular positions were classified using neural networks.