For two-dimensional forward-looking sonar imaging, high sidelobes significantly degrade the quality of sonar images. The cosine window function weighting method is often applied to suppress the sidelobe levels in the angular and range dimensions at the expense of the main lobe resolutions. Therefore, the improved spatially variant apodization imaging method for forward-looking sonar is proposed to reduce the sidelobes without degrading the main lobe resolution in angular-range dimensions. The proposed method is a nonlinear post-processing operation in which the raw complex-valued sonar image produced by a conventional beamformer and matched filter is weighted by a spatially variant coefficient. To enhance the robustness of the spatially variant apodization approach, the array magnitude and phase errors are calibrated to prevent beam sidelobe heightening from occurring prior to beamforming operations. The analyzed results of numerical simulations and a lake experiment demonstrate that the proposed method can greatly reduce the sidelobes to approximately -40 dB, while the main lobe width remains unchanged. Moreover, this method has an extremely simple computational process.
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