The orbital angular momentum (OAM) wave has shown great potential for improving radar imaging and underwater communication performance due to its helical wavefront phase and infinite orthogonal modes. However, there are currently no known applications of this technology in underwater imaging. In this paper, we employed acoustic OAM wave for underwater imaging and established transceiver signal models using the uniform circular array. We concurrently achieved two-dimensional imaging of azimuth and elevation angles, which differs from radar imaging. We proposed a matching process for the echo signal in the modal domain, the OAM wave beam image's sidelobe decreased by 7.9 dB in the elevation direction and 6.1 dB in the azimuth direction compared to the plane wave, with the mainlobe decreased by 0.2° in the elevation direction and 0.4° in the azimuth direction. Furthermore, this paper introduced OAM wave high-resolution image reconstruction based on the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm. Finally, we implemented broadband acoustic OAM wave for underwater imaging and introduced an image reconstruction method based on the modal domain OMP algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the use of OAM wave in underwater imaging is feasible, and the proposed scheme can achieve high-resolution imaging.
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