Underwater bottom still mine classification using robust time-frequency feature and relevance vector machine

A novel approach to the problem of detecting and classifying underwater bottom mine objects in littoral environments from acoustic backscattered signals is considered. We begin by defining robust short-time Fourier transform to convert the received echo into a time-frequency (TF) plane. Identify interest local region in spectrogram, then features in TF plane with robustness to reverberation and noise disturbances are built. Finally, echo features are sent to a relevance vector machine (RVM) classifier that represents a Bayesian extension of support vector machine (SVM). To evaluate the performace of the classifier based on this approach, the classification experiment of two typical types of mines lying on the bottom have been performed with a broad bandwidth active sonar. Each of the targets was lying on the lake bottom at a depth of 20m. The case study exploits the robustness of a feature extraction scheme, and furthermore, RVM yields a much sparser solution and improves the classification accuracy than SVM in an impulse noise environment.