Airborne lidar provides an effective method for detection and localization
of underwater objects, where the transmitted laser beam can penetrate the
air-water interface and illuminate the scatterers within the water column,
and the optical field generated by this scattering can be collected and
processed. Here, we consider the use of lidar data collected from different
observation angles of a particular water volume to image objects of interest.
Interpreting the lidar returns as tomographic
projections of a 3-D reflectivity field, we formulate the problem as
a 3-D tomographic image reconstruction problem.
For our reconstructions, we have worked with real and synthetic data
sets. We have produced the synthetic data by using an accurate statistical
model that incorporates multiple scattering.
To be submitted to J. Opt. Soc. Am. A.