Abstract
Acoustic waves are a carrier of information mainly in environments where
the use of other types of waves, for example electromagnetic waves, is
limited. The term acoustical imaging is widely used in the ultrasonic
engineering to imaging areas in which the acoustic waves propagate. In
particular, ultrasound is widely used in the visualization of human
organs-ultrasonography (Nowicki, 2010).
Expanding the concept, acoustical imaging can also be used to presentation
(monitoring) the current state of sound intensity distribution leading to
characterization of sources in observed underwater region.
This can be represented in the form of an acoustic characteristic of the area,
for example as a spectrogram. Knowledge of the underwater world which is
built by analogy to the perception of the space on the Earth's surface is
to be systematize in the form of images. Those images arise as a result of
graphical representation of processed acoustic signals.
In this paper, it is explained why acoustic waves are used in underwater
imaging. Furthermore, the passive and active systems for underwater
observation are presented. The paper is illustrated by acoustic images,
most of them originated from our own investigation.
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