• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.26 no.6_spc
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• pp.687-696
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• 2016

A series of process to design an acoustic lens for underwater imaging is reviewed and the method to evaluate characteristics of the lens is investigated. If the target specification of lens is given, the design process consists of the material selection, evaluation of its properties, lens geometry design, prediction of lens characteristics, manufacturing, and evaluation by measurement. In this study, an actual acoustical lens is made by cutting polymethylpentene block. The characteristics of lens are predicted by the hybrid method, combination of ray tracing and Rayleigh integral. For the direct comparison between the prediction and measurement results, a simulation method based on the equivalent source method is suggested to reflect the actual radiation pattern of transducer used for measurements. Finally, the measurement is conducted in a small water tank to observe the actual characteristics of the manufactured lens.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.95-103
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• 2013

An underwater acoustic (UWA) communication in shallow water is strongly affected by the water surface and the seabed acoustical properties. Every reflected signal to receiver experiences a time-variant scattering in sea surface roughness and a grazing-angle-dependent reflection loss in bottom. Consequently, the performance of UWA communication systems is degraded, and high-speed digital communication is disrupted. If there is a dominant signal path such as a direct path, the received signal is modeled statistically as Rice fading but if not, it is modeled as Rayleigh fading. However, it has been known to be very difficult to reproduce the statistical estimation by real experimental evaluation in the sea. To give an insight for this scattering and grazing-angle-dependent bottom reflection loss effect in UWA communication, authors conduct experiments to quantify these effects. The image is transmitted using binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) modulation. The quality of the received image is shown to be affected by water surface scattering and grazing-angle-dependent bottom reflection loss. The analysis is based on the transmitter to receiver range and the receiver depth dependent image quality and bit error rate (BER). The results show that the received image quality is highly dependent on the transmitter-receiver range and receiver depth which characterizes the channel coherence bandwidth.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.487-492
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• 2015

A short-range underwater target detection and identification techniques using mid- and high-frequency bands have been highly developed. However, nowadays the long-range detection using the low-frequency band is requested and one of the most challengeable issues. The waveform inversion technique is widely used and the hottest technology in both academia and industry of the seismic exploration. It is based on the numerical analysis tool, and could construct more than a few kilometers of the subsurface structures and model-parameters such as P-wave velocity using a low-frequency band. By applying this technique to the underwater acoustic circumstance, firstly application of underwater target detection is verified. Furthermore, subsurface structures and it's parameters of the war-field are well reconstructed. We can confirm that this technique greatly reduces the false-alarm rate for the underwater targets because it could accurately reproduce both the shape and the model-parameters at the same time.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.175-182
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• 2016

For application to several MHz photoacoustic imaging systems, a needle hydrophone was designed and fabricated by using PMN-PZT piezoelectric single crystal, and its characteristics were evaluated through comparison with a commercial PVDF(Polybinylidene Fluoride) hydrophone of which receiving sensitivity is known. The simulation using the KLM model results show that the peak receiving impulse response for $50{\Omega}$ terminating impedance of the fabricated hydrophone is -261.6 dB re $1V/{\mu}Pa$ and the frequency response is relatively flat over 2 ~ 12 MHz with fluctuation less than 5 dB. The measurement results using tone burst signals also show that it has higher (ave. 10.9 dB) sensitivity than the commercial hydrophone in 2 ~ 8 MHz, and the receiving sensitivity of $-255.8{\pm}2.8$ dB re $1V/{\mu}Pa$ was measured for the fabricated hydrophone. In addition, it is known that the photoacoustic signals and the image of a hair obtained by a mechanical scanned photoacoustic imaging system with the fabricated hydrophone were bigger and better than those obtained with the commercial hydrophone.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.121-129
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• 2021

This paper deals with a super-resolution that improves the resolution of side scan sonar images using learning-based compressive sensing. Learning-based compressive sensing combined with deep learning and compressive sensing takes a structure of a feed-forward network and parameters are set automatically through learning. In particular, we propose a method that can effectively extract additional information required in the super-resolution process through various initialization methods. Representative experimental results show that the proposed method provides improved performance in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) than conventional methods.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.8-17
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• 2023

Various sources, such as wind, waves, ships, and gas leaks from the seafloor, forms bubbles in the ocean. Underwater bubbles cause signal scattering, considerably affecting acoustic measurements. This characteristic of bubbles is used to block underwater noise by attenuating the intensity of the propagated signal. Recently, researchers have been studying the large-scale release of methane gas as bubble plumes from the seabed. Understanding the physical properties and distribution of bubble plumes is crucial for studying the relation between leaked methane gas and climate change. Therefore, a water tank experiment was conducted to estimate the distribution of bubble plumes using seismic imaging techniques and acoustic signals obtained from artificially generated bubbles using a bubble generator. Reverse time migration was applied to image the bubble plumes while the acquired acoustic envelope signal was used to effectively estimate bubble distribution. Imaging results were compared with optical camera images to verify the estimated bubble distribution. The water tank experiment confirmed that the proposed system could successfully image the distribution of bubble plumes using reverse time migration and the envelope signal. The experiment showed that the scattering signal of artificial bubble plumes can be used for seismic imaging.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.754-757
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• 2007

In this paper, we present an implementation and it's real-sea test of an underwater acoustic data communication system, which allows the system to reduce complexity and increase robustness in time variant underwater environments. For easy adaptation to complicated and time-varying environments of the ocean, all-digital transmitter and receiver systems were implemented. For frame synchronization the CAZAC sequence was used, and QPSK modulation/ demodulation method with carrier frequency of 25kHz and a bandwidth of 5kHz were applied to generate 10kbps transmission rate including overhead. To improve transmission quality, we used several techniques and algorithms such as adaptive beamforming, adaptive equalizer, and convolution coding/Viterbi decoding. for the verification of the system performance, measurement of BER has been done in a very shallow water with depth of 8m at JangMok, Geoje. During the experiment, image data were successfully transmitted up to about 7.4km.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.382-390
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• 2021

Synthetic aperture sonars as well as side scan sonars or multibeam echo sounders have been commercialized and are widely used for seafloor imaging. In Korea related research such as the development of a towed synthetic aperture sonar system is underway. In order to obtain high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar images, it is necessary to accurately estimate the platform motion on which it is installed, and a precise underwater navigation system is required. In this paper we are going to provide reference data for determining the required navigation accuracy and precision of navigation sensors by quantitatively analyzing how much distortion of the sonar images occurs according to motion characteristics of the platform equipped with the synthetic aperture sonar. Five types of motions are considered and normalized root mean square error is defined for quantitative analysis. Simulation for error analysis with parameter variation of motion characteristics results in that yaw and sway motion causes the largest image distortion whereas the effect of pitch and heave motion is not significant.