2016 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 219-232
Some marine mineral resources have been found in the waters surrounding Japan, but exploration techniques are still under development, and the amount of those resources is currently unknown. As part of these efforts, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology launched the system development of their marine mineral resources regional exploration project in 2013. In the Asada laboratory, we are working to establish a system to explore hydrothermal deposit areas on the seafloor. One aspect of this is the development of hydrothermal deposit exploration technology by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar (InSAS). In the conventional method, manual processing led to variation and a large processing time to obtain the results of analysis. In this study, we attempt to eliminate these problems by replacing interference processing in a general-purpose approach. A detailed survey of coring, etc., is required, one that incorporates synthetic aperture processing in order to be able to generate high resolution data. The results show the characteristics of the hydrothermal deposit terrain of chimneys and mounds in an acoustic image. Furthermore, it was possible to eliminate the time-consuming manual analysis used in the conventional method.
