Sensitivity of echo envelope fractal dimension to bottom type and bottom depth - numerical results

The presented results are a part of those obtained within the author's latest work on application of normal incidence methods in acoustic seafloor characterisation. The work included both theoretical and experimental studies on selection of appropriate methods of seafloor echo processing and feature extraction for characterisation of the bottom type, especially, the study of the usefulness of several echo parameters like fractal dimension or statistical moments of the echo envelope. In this paper, the simulation results of the echo envelope fractal dimension dependence on bottom type and bottom depth are presented. They show that to same extent, fractal dimension of an echo may be useful for bottom identification even in a case of varying depth, however, more detailed, theoretical as well as experimental studies are needed.