Beamformed GeoTIFF images of synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) data

The simulated synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) data presented here was generated using PoSSM [Johnson and Brown 2018]. The data is suitable for bistatic, coherent signal processing and will form acoustic seafloor imagery. Included in this data package is simulated sonar data in Generic Data Format (GDF) files, a description of the GDF file contents, example SAS imagery, and supporting information about the simulated scenes. In total, there are eleven 60 m x 90 m scenes, labeled scene00 through scene10, with scene00 provided with the scatterers in isolation, i.e. no seafloor texture. This is provided for beamformer testing purposes and should result in an image similar to the one labeled "PoSSM-scene00-scene00-starboard-0.tif" in the Related Data Sets tab. The ten other scenes have varying degrees of model variation as described in "Description_of_Simulated_SAS_Data_Package.pdf". A description of the data and the model is found in the associated document called "Description_of_Simulated_SAS_Data_Package.pdf" and a description of the format in which the raw binary data is stored is found in the related document "PSU_GDF_Format_20240612.pdf". The format description also includes MATLAB code that will effectively parse the data to aid in signal processing and image reconstruction. It is left to the researcher to develop a beamforming algorithm suitable for coherent signal and image processing. Each 60 m x 90 m scene is represented by 4 raw (not beamformed) GDF files, labeled sceneXX-STARBOARD-000000 through 000003. It is possible to beamform smaller scenes from any one of these 4 files, i.e. the four files are combined sequentially to form a 60 m x 90 m image. Also included are comma separated value spreadsheets describing the locations of scatterers and objects of interest within each scene. In addition to the binary GDF data, a beamformed GeoTIFF image and a single-look complex (SLC, science file) data of each scene is provided. The SLC data (science) is stored in the Hierarchical Data Format 5 (https://www.hdfgroup.org/), and appended with ".hdf5" to indicate the HDF5 format. The data are stored as 32-bit real and 32-bit complex values. A viewer is available that provides basic graphing, image display, and directory navigation functions (https://www.hdfgroup.org/downloads/hdfview/). The HDF file contains all the information necessary to reconstruct a synthetic aperture sonar image. All major and contemporary programming languages have library support for encoding/decoding the HDF5 format. Supporting documentation that outlines positions of the seafloor scatterers is included in "Scatterer_Locations_Scene00.csv", while the locations of the objects of interest for scene01-scene10 are included in "Object_Locations_All_Scenes.csv". Portable Network Graphic (PNG) images that plot the location of objects of all the objects of interest in each scene in Along-Track and Cross-Track notation are provided.