Improved underwater acoustic imaging with non‐uniform spatial resampling RL deconvolution

Underwater acoustic imaging (UAI) can be utilised to observe the spatial distribution of a near‐field sound source. The image quality depends on the resolution and sidelobe level of conventional beamforming. The linear array‐based UAI can be considered as deconvolution of a two‐dimensional point spread function shift‐variant model. The performance of UAI can be improved via innovative deconvolution algorithms. In this study, a non‐uniform spatial resampling Richardson–Lucy (RL) fast algorithm is designed in which the amount of samples is determined by the power of the UAI output. This allows for a significant decrease in the number of samples compared to the traditional RL algorithm with similar positioning accuracy. Computer simulations and sea trials are performed to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.