Imaging sonar produces clear images in underwater environments, independent of water turbidity and lighting conditions. The next generation 2D forward looking sonars are compact in size and able to generate high-resolution images which facilitate underwater robotics research. Considering the difficulties and expenses of implementing experiments in underwater environments, tremendous work has been focused on sonar image simulation. However, sonar artifacts like multi-path reflection were not sufficiently discussed, which cannot be ignored in water tank environments. In this paper, we focus on the influence of echoes from the flat ground. We propose a method to simulate the ground echo effect physically in acoustic images. We model the multi-bounce situations using the single-bounce framework for computation efficiency. We compare the real image captured in the water tank with the synthetic images to validate the proposed methods.

翻译：水下成像声纳能够在水下环境中产生清晰的图像，不受水浊度和光线条件的影响。下一代 2D 前瞻声纳体积小，能够生成高分辨率的图像，有助于水下机器人研究。考虑到在水下环境中实施实验的困难和费用，人们已经集中精力进行声纳图像模拟的工作。然而，声纳伪影，如多路径反射，尚未得到充分讨论，在水箱环境中不能忽略。本文重点研究来自平坦地面的回波影响。我们提出了一种在声学图像中物理模拟地面回波效应的方法。我们使用单次反弹框架建模多次反弹的情况，以实现计算效率。我们将在水箱中捕获的真实图像与合成图像进行比较，以验证所提出的方法。