Bionic study of distance-azimuth discrimination of multi-scattered point objects in bat bio-sonar

Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to enhance the discrimination capacity of multi-scattered point objects in bat bio-sonar. A broadband interferometer mathematical model is developed, incorporating both distance and azimuth information, to simulate the transmitted and received signals of bats. The Fourier transform is employed to simulate the preprocessing step of bat information for feature extraction. Furthermore, the bat bio-sonar model based on convolutional neural network (BS-CNN) is constructed to compensate for the limitations of conventional machine learning and CNN networks, including three strategies: Mix-up data enhancement, joint feature and hybrid atrous convolution module. The proposed BS-CNN model emulates the perceptual nerves of the bat brain for distance-azimuth discrimination and compares with four conventional classifiers to assess its discrimination efficacy. Experimental results demonstrate that the overall discrimination accuracy of the BS-CNN model is 93.4%, surpassing conventional CNN networks and machine learning methods by at least 5.9%. This improvement validates the efficacy of the BS-CNN bionic model in enhancing the discrimination accuracy in bat bio-sonar and offers valuable references for radar and sonar target classification.