Chinese-German Joint Symposium on Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering, August 24-30, 2008, Darmstadt

AUTOMATIC STATIONARY TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS IN SIDE-SCAN SONAR IMAGERY

Wen-Miin Tian* and Meng-Wei Guo**
* National Sun Yet-sen University/Department of Marine Environment and Engineering, Center of Asia-Pacific Marine Researches, Kaohsiung ** National Sun Yet-sen University/Department of Marine Environment and Engineering, Kaohsiung
Abstract: The purpose of the current investigation was dedicated to the development of an automatic image analysis program for the detection and identification of stationary targets, such as meter-sized concrete artificial reefs, on the sea floor. The major components of the program include: image acquisition; feature extraction; feature classification; target identification; and target properties analysis. Program verification and optimal parameters determination were conducted with a high quality sonograph of 650 x 650 pixels. Optimal parameters, i.e., a region size of 38 x 38 pixels, a region sliding distance of 4 and 16 quantized grey levels for this type of image were suggested. A realistic evaluation of this program was conducted and proved successful. The automatic image analysis program based on grey level co-occurrence matrix, unsupervised Bayesian classifier and hierarchical cluster analysis can improve the detection and identification of stationary targets in side-scan sonar imagery. It offered a potential for the development of a completely automatic system for the detection of stationary target in real time at sea.

I. INTRODUCTION Sonar data collected while searching for, or identifying, underwater stationary targets is often presented to the operator in the form of a two dimensional image. This is a result of the threedimensional nature of the search domain and the human use of vision as the primary source of sensory information. The heavy human reliance on visual information has made human beings highly skilled at the detection and classification of objects in images. Image processing can be applied to the sonar data to help operators detect and classify objects on the sea floor. The processing of sonar data can be broken into two domains. The first domain is the use of signal processing techniques to enhance the creation of sonar imagery. This includes the use of adaptive beamforming techniques to enhance the contrast of objects in sonar imagery. The second domain is the use of image processing techniques on sonar imagery to aid or automate the detection and classification of objects. Artificial benthic habitats have long been deployed for promoting the coastal fishery resources. In Taiwan, a comprehensive project for the construction and deployment of artificial reefs to enhance commercial fisheries was initiated in 1973. Since then, the government had invested over $40 million in this long-term program and over 160,000 unit of various types of artificial habitats had been deployed in 57 sites. To fulfill the necessities in searching and positioning of artificial habitats an intrinsic

methodology was adapted. This technique, which incorporated the knowledge and practices of underwater acoustical surveying and image processing, consists a side-scan sonar system, a positioning satellite system, a subsurface navigation system, and a sonar image acquisition and processing system. The main objectives of the study were (i) to evaluate the feasibility of using side-scan sonar in identifying artificial habitats, (ii) to establish an effective and reliable procedure to conduct searching for, detecting and locating artificial benthic habitats, (iii) to develop an automatic procedure for the detection of these artificial reefs, and (iv) to document positions and distribution status of the artificial habitats and integrate results in a database framework for site identification and management. This paper was dedicated in the discussion in the development of a completely automatic procedure for the detection and quantification of artificial reefs in side-scan sonar imagery. II. IMAGE TEXTURE CHARACTERIZATION Side-scan sonar images are mainly described by their tonal and textural properties. However, most physical processes, and their surface manifestations, cannot be described only with their tonal properties. Texture properties correspond to the spatial organization of the grey levels within a neighbourhood. Theoretical and experimental studies show that they are best quantified with stochastic methods, such as grey-level cooccurrence matrices (GLCMs).

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GLCMs address the average spatial relationships between pixels of a small region, by quantifying the relative frequency of occurrence of two grey levels at a specified distance and angle from each other. The distance D(d, ) between pixels is very sensitive to the orientation . For each region, four different GLCMs can be created using values of 0, 45, 90, and 135o and a d value of 1. To eliminate the influence of the angle at which the image is ensonified, the matrices are averaged. For a traditional image quantized with 256 grey levels (8 bits), each region will be associated with a matrix of 256x256 floating-point values. The reduction in the number of grey levels yields a reduction in the size of the matrix. For a region with dimensions of NGxNG pixels, a suitable number of grey levels less than NG was suggested. Once the GLCM for a region has been computed, it can be used to compute texture statistics that can serve as features for the classification system. More than 25 texture indices are available, and only two indices, entropy and homogeneity, have proven useful for classification of acoustic images. Entropy measures the lack of spatial organization inside the region where the GLCM is computed. Entropy is high when all co-occurrence frequencies are equal., i.e., very low. This corresponds to areas of rougher textures. Conversely, entropy is low when the texture is smoother and more homogeneous. Homogeneity is directly proportional to the amount of local similarities inside the computation region. This parameter will be higher in regions of homogeneous backscatter of in regions with a few grey levels organized along at the scale of the computation region. III. THE AUTOMATIC DETECTION AND EVALUATION PROCESS The overall goal of the automatic detection and evaluation system developed was to aid the engineers and operators in the interpretation of sidescan sonar imagery collected in the field. However, a long-term goal is dedicated to develop a completely automatic system for the detection of stationary target in real time at sea. Major components of the system developed included: acoustic image acquisition and processing, textural feature extraction for fixed-sized regions, feature classification, hierarchical cluster analysis for target identification, and target quantification and visualization of the results (Fig.1).
A. Acoustic Image Acquisition and Processing A side-scan sonar produces images of the seafloor, made of points (pixels) whose values are proportional to the amount of energy backscattered, which are expressed as grey levels. The backscattering is affected, in decreasing importance, by the geometry of the sensor-target system (relative angle of ensonification), the morphological characteristics of the surface (e.g., micro-scale roughness) and by its intrinsic nature (composition, density, impedance, relative importance of volume and surface reverberation). Acoustic impedance (the product of density, and compressional wave

velocity, v) can be used to define the reflection coefficient, R for normal incidence, which is a measure of the strength of the reflection:

R=

2 v2 1 v1 2 v2 + 1 v1

(1)

For a traditional concrete cubic artificial reef with dimensions of 2 m x 2 m x 2m, the reflection coefficient (R) for normal incidence with respect to sea water is approximately 0.68. The reflection coefficient of typical sandy sediments off southwest Taiwan is approximately 0.33. Therefore, an artificial reef lying on sandy sediment will acoustically appear as dark, rectangle shaped scatters accompanied by shadow. The accompanying shadow will depend on the height of the reef extended above the seafloor and the altitude of the sonar towfish above the bottom. The geocoded side-scan sonar image was further processed, which included geometric corrections (i.e., slant range to ground range) and radiometric corrections (i.e., time-varying gain corrections). Major factors which played an important rule in the results of automatic target detection are quality and pixel resolution of the side-scan sonar imagery. The influence of image quality on the final results is apparent. Good quality images are more likely to result in a well defined classification. However images that are excessively disturbed or distorted, exhibit interlacing, or even images which have been taken with a lot of noise in the water column will all result in lower quality information being extracted in the feature vector. Lower quality data in the feature vector will make it difficult for the classification system to converge towards a suitable result. Good quality images are directly correlated to the working conditions during acquisition which includes: sea state, towfish stability, towing platforms stability, towfish altitude, sound velocity profile and noise (both ambient and self-made). Detectability of a stationary target on the sonograph is highly dependent on its pixel resolution. The parameters affecting pixel resolution are sonar range scale, tow speed and horizontal beam directivity, and can be summarized as the number of sonar pings hitting the target. A conservative plan for the detection of a target includes one which chooses tow speeds and ranges that will allow for at least 12 insonifications (pings) in a forward travel distance equal to the targets least dimension.
B. Textural Feature Extraction forFfixed-Sized Regions Image texture is an attribute of groups of adjacent pixels; therefore, it is useful to group pixels into regions and to extract features that describe the texture of the region. A square sliding region was used for region extraction in this investigation. Region size and sliding distance are two major parameters for the algorithm. Among them, a region size must be selected that is large enough to capture sufficient textural information but small enough to

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avoid regions that contain a mixture of textures. Theoretically, the best region size can be determined empirically based on pixel resolution of the image and target dimensions. In addition, a sliding distance (or inter-pixel displacement) can determine the total regions involved in the

investigation. A sliding distance of 1 is equivalent to feature extraction for each pixel in the image. A sliding distance of 2 can reduce the total region number involved to a quarter compared with a sliding distance of 1.

Figure 1. The automatic target detection and identification process.

Measurements of texture in images can be one dimensional (e.g., run length, fixed-size pixel neighborhoods, etc.) or two dimensional (e.g., grey level co-occurrence matrices). In this investigation, three textural features (mean, entropy and homogeneity) were selected and incorporated into the classification system. Among them the mean pixel intensity is one dimensional feature and the other two are two dimensional features. For a specific region, the mean is the average of the intensity value of the unquantized pixel values for this region. The entropy and homogeneity are computed based on the grey level co-occurrence matrix for this region.

C. Feature Classification The goal of classification is to assign the regions of an image to an appropriate class in such a way that some error measure is minimized. An unsupervised Bayesian classification system, AutoClass, was used to cluster regions from acoustic images. Three texture features with equivalent weight were used in this process. D. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis for Target Identification To fulfill the necessity of completely automatic target identification, a hierarchical cluster analysis of the classified classes was conducted based on the posterior probabilities for each classified classes.
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The results of the analysis are illustrated in a dendrogram and target identification is conducted based on the value of the highest sure group clicking.
E. Target Quantification and Visualization of the Results Visualization of the results is accomplished by mapping the representative pixels of each region classified as the target cluster (produced in the classification step and identified by hierarchical cluster analysis) into a specific color (red or black). Physical properties of the targets are therefore quantized which includes target perimeter, coordinates, area, shape factor (perimeter/area) and total number.

determined, which include: region size, region sliding distance, number of grey levels, number of classes and feature selection. An evaluation process based on produces accuracy, error of omission and consumers accuracy was adopted in this investigation.
A. Optimal Parameters Determination Optimal region size and region sliding distance for this specific type of sonograph were evaluated and determined empirically. Initial investigation illustrated that a region sliding distance of 4 is an acceptable selection in this case. Based on this sliding distance, classified images using 16 grey levels and region sizes of 8x8, 12x12, 16x16, 24x24, 28x28, 32x32, 36x36, and 40x40 were evaluated. For these experiments, AutoClass was set to execute for 4 attempts as suggested by this computer program, all regions were used for classification, and AutoClass was allowed to determine the number of classes. In most cases, AutoClass would cluster the features into 7 classes. The evaluation results (Fig-3) indicated that the 28x28 region size, with maximum value of produces accuracy (93.5%) and consumers accuracy (88.2%) and minimum value of error of omission (6.5%), was the optimal region size for the identification of artificial reefs in this case.

IV. PROGRAM VERIFICATION AND CALIBRATION Program verification and optimal parameters determination were conducted with a sonograph (650 x 650 pixels and covers an area of 48 x 48 m) acquired at Chey-Ding artificial reef site off Kaohsiung County in 2005 (Fig-2). The side-scan sonar system was operated at 500 kHz with slant range setting at 75 m, towing speed of 3 knots and towfish altitude of 10 m above sea floor. The sonograph, illustrating good quality, has been processed under slant-range corrections and radiometric corrections to enhance the contrast of targets. The visual interpretation of the sonar image illustrates two types of textures, i.e., concrete, cubic artificial reefs scattered on a homogenous sandy sea floor.

Figure 3. Optimal region size determination based on produces accuracy, consumers accuracy and error of omission.

Figure 2. Side-scan sonar image for program verification and calibration. (650 x 650 pixels)

Feature extraction is the dominant problem in automatic target identification from images. Values for a number of different parameters related to feature extraction and classification must be

B. Target Identification by Hierarchical Cluster Analysis Target identification was conducted based on the posterior probabilities for each classified classes. Seven classes were classified in this case and the cluster analysis dendrogram (Fig-4) showing similarity of these classes. The length of the branches, i.e., sure group clicking, indicates degree of similarity (short being more similar). At rescaled distance of 20.6 to 25, there are two clusters (labeled A and B). Since the minimum rescaled distance (sure group clicking value) is 20.6 and quite large, it is evident that the similarities of these two clusters are comparatively low. Cluster A contains two targetrelated classes (i.e., concrete reefs; class#5 and class#7) and Cluster B five seafloor-related classes.

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The two target-related classes can be identified as reef highlight (class#7) and reef shadow (class#5) by feature values and shape factors. Therefore, the dendrogram and the sure group clicking value were quantized for target identification.
C. Target Quantification Region growing technique was employed for the quantification of physical properties of the identified targets which includes target perimeter, center coordinates, area, shape factor (perimeter/area) and total number (Fig-5). It is worth mention that the total number of targets evaluated by this investigation varied between 9 and 20 and the real number based on visual observation is 14.

textures, i.e., concrete, cubic artificial reefs and small (dimensions less than 1 m) cross-shaped artificial reefs scattered on a homogenous sandy sea floor.

Figure 4. Cluster analysis dendrogram showing similarity of acoustic texture of classified classes.

Figure 5. physical properties of the identified targets

V. CASE STUDY AND RESULTS The high quality, 500 kHz image (Fig-6) selected for a case study was acquired at Fang-Liau artificial reef site off Pyng-Dong County in 2007 with instrument settings identical to that conducted at Chey-Ding artificial reef site. During the side-scan sonar survey, a total area of 1 nm2 was covered, and the image selected is a typical representative of this site with dimensions of 2048 x 6050 pixels and covers an area of 150 x 900 m. The visual interpretation of the image illustrates three types of

Figure 6. Side-scan sonar image for case study (2048 x 6065 pixels)

The image was processed under slant-range corrections and radiometric corrections to enhance the contrast of targets. To perform target identification, the image was divided into smaller

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blocks with dimensions of 2048 x 550 pixels and a 50 pixel overlapping for consecutive blocks. Optimal parameters determined previously were used which include a region size of 38 x 38 pixels, a region sliding distance of 4 and 16 quantified grey levels. In addition, a corridor of 108 pixels wide centered at the suture line was omitted during region extraction. 12 consecutive blocks were obtained and the target identification tasks were conducted one block at a time. It is worth mention that at slant range setting at 75 m, the side-scan sonar ping repetition rate is 10 pulses per second. An image block of 550 pixels (pings) in length is equivalent to a data acquisition period of 55 seconds in the field. Therefore, the image processing algorithm proposed in this investigation has a potential to be used in a real time processing environment does not just fit in offline, post-processing tasks.

Figure 8. Classification results of block#8 illustrate the existence of cubic reefs (class#7).

Figure 9. Classification results of block#3 illustrate the existence of small cross-shaped reefs but can not properly identified.

Figure 7. Relationship of sure group clicking value and the existence of targets on the sea floor.

Figure 10. Classification results of block#11 illustrate no target existed on the sea floor.

The results showed that the contents of each block can be evaluated based on the sure group

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clicking value obtained by hierarchical cluster analysis (Fig. 7). The values which fell between 20.6 and 24.4 indicate that there are cubic reefs existed in the block and can be identified properly (Fig. 8). Between 15.3 and 17.4 indicate that there are targets with smaller dimensions (i.e., small crossshaped reefs) existed in the block which can not be properly identified (Fig. 9). Between 10.1 and 10.9, there is no target existed on the seafloor (Fig. 10). The classification results of the selected image were established through image fusion of the individual, consecutive blocks (Fig. 10). Blocks with smaller targets which can not be detected properly (i.e., #1, #2, and #3) were further investigated by employing smaller region sizes. However, the results are still not convincing. It is suggested that the image possess certain internal noises which caused problems related to the detection of smaller targets. The results of target quantification indicated that there are 41 targets existed, the center coordinates and area covered were calculated, and the total number of cubic artificial reefs identified in this case is between 122 and 240. VI. CONCLUSIONS A completely automatic image analysis program for the detection and identification of stationary targets, such as meter-sized concrete artificial reefs, on the sea floor was developed. The major components of the program include: image acquisition (side-scan sonar); feature extraction (grey level co-occurrence matrix); feature classification (un-supervised Bayesian classifier); target identification (hierarchical cluster analysis); and target properties analysis (region growing technique). Program verification and optimal parameters determination were conducted with a high quality, sonograph of 650 x 650 pixels, 500 kHz, and slant range setting at 75 m. Optimal parameters, i.e., a region size of 38 x 38 pixels, a region sliding distance of 4 and 16 quantized grey levels, for this type of image were suggested. A realistic evaluation of this program was conducted and proved successful. The automatic image analysis program based on grey level co-occurrence matrix, unsupervised Bayesian classifier and hierarchical cluster analysis can improve the detection and identification of stationary targets in side-scan sonar imagery. Although the program was tested and verified in offline, post-processing tasks, It offered a potential for the development of a completely automatic system for the detection of stationary target in real time at sea.

Figure 11. Results of target identification which indicate that the cubic artificial reef can be properly identified while the crossshaped reefs are acknowledged but can not be detected properly.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT Financial support of this research was provided by the National Science Council of the Republic of China (ROC) (NSC96-2221-E-110-101) and Center of Asia-Pacific Marine Researches (C030306). REFERENCES
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