Mine detection, identification and classification especially of objects sitting near, on or just below the sea bottom in cluttered environments can be extremely challenging. Houston et. al.[1] demonstrated that it is possible to excite structural acoustic modes below 25 kHz and use these to identify mines. They concluded that multi-aspect scattering cross sections extracted over a broad range of frequencies could be used to identify mines. For objects on the sea floor, the main challenge was to separate the energy scattered from the bottom from energy scattered from man-made objects. The development and demonstration of a Novel Acoustic Source for target identification and classification that is capable of directly exciting resonances in a variety of targets on or proud of the sea floor will be investigated under the proposed effort. [1] B. H. Houston, J. A. Bucaro, T. Yoder, L. Klaus and J. Tressler, “Boadband Low Frequency Sonar for Non-Imaging Based Identification”, IEEE Oceans Engineering, 383-387, 2002.
