A dolphin-inspired compact sonar for underwater acoustic imaging

Underwater imaging sonars are widely used for oceanic exploration but are bulky and expensive for some applications. The sonar system of dolphins, which uses sound pulses called clicks to investigate their environment, offers superior shape discrimination capability compared to human-derived imaging sonars of similar size and frequency. In order to gain better understanding of dolphin sonar imaging, we train a dolphin to acoustically interrogate certain objects and match them visually. We record the echoes the dolphin receives and are able to extract object shape information from these recordings. We find that infusing prior information into the processing, specifically the sparsity of the shapes, yields a clearer interpretation of the echoes than conventional signal processing. We subsequently develop a biomimetic sonar system that combines sparsity-aware signal processing with high-frequency broadband click signals similar to that of dolphins, emitted by an array of transmitters. Our findings offer insights and tools towards compact higher resolution sonar imaging technologies.