Abstract:The traditional radiometric distortion correction methods for side scan sonar (SSS) image make it difficult to resolve the problem of fine image acquisition in complex sea bottom sediment and operating environment. Based on radiometric distortion of SSS image, a comprehensive radiometric distortion correction method is proposed. This method has been applied in Jiaozhou bay, eliminating the influence of marine environment, obvious variation of sea-bottom sediment and adjustment of time vary gain (TVG) parameters, realized the high-quality acquisition of images under complex marine environment and noise. Compared with the traditional statistical method, the entropy value of the image is reduced and the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is increased, which indicates that the SSS image quality has been improved effectively.