Technical Report No. 2016-02 : Topological Investigation of Target/Clutter Features in Sonar Data

This project enables target classification from unprocessed synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) collections in various clutter contexts by providing principled, foundational analysis of target echo structure through the lens of topological signal processing. It intends to provide systematic validation of target/environment simulations by detecting hidden symmetries in data. Spurious symmetries in simulated data can pose a risk to classification algorithms trained on that simulated data, because they may overfit according to those symmetries. On the other hand, experimental data may contain un-leveraged symmetries that are not adequately captured by simulation. By combining both sets of symmetries, this project will enable the extraction of actionable, physics-aware features for classification from simulated and experimental data.