Self-Supervised Multibeam Sonar Restoration via Coherent Forward Modeling

Abstract

Multibeam imaging sonar produces intensity images degraded by coherent speckle and system-induced blur, while clean reflectivity targets are rarely available. Existing despeckling methods often rely on simplified intensity-domain noise models, synthetic clean targets, or blind-spot self-supervision, and typically do not jointly model deblurring and speckle suppression. We propose a physics-consistent self-supervised framework for joint despeckling and deblurring of multibeam imaging sonar. A stochastic coherent image-formation model yields a conditional-mean forward operator that relates latent scene reflectivity to expected intensity through the squared magnitude of the system point spread function. We then use registered multi-frame sonar sequences to train without clean ground truth images, showing that, under an idealized inter-frame conditional-mean condition, the expected paired loss equals the corresponding forward-prediction loss up to a network-independent constant. To stabilize the ill-conditioned inverse problem, we further adapt robust equivariant imaging using stochastic coherent simulation and introduce a paired forward prediction error metric for ground-truth-free evaluation. Experiments on two real multibeam sonar datasets demonstrate a favourable balance between forward-prediction agreement, homogeneous-region speckle suppression, and preservation of visible structural boundaries compared with representative baselines.