Color photo of student.

Thomas Blanford

Research Assistant Professor
Phone: (603) 862-3202
Office: UNH Center for Acoustics Research & Education, Morse Hall, Durham, NH 03824

My research primarily investigates acoustic sensing in underwater environments, where problems of physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science all intersect. Acoustic sensors are often complicated devices, with mechanical, electrical, and acoustical elements. Each of these components, along with the environment, all color and influence the signals the sensor is intended to detect. I am particularly interested in understanding the relationships and interactions between the stimuli, the sensor, and the environment. This research often involves developing models to predict performance and interactions and designing, building, and testing new sensors (including transducers, electronics, and signal processing).

Education

  • Ph.D., Acoustics, Pennsylvania State University

Research Interests

  • Acoustics
  • Sensing Devices and Transducers
  • Signal Processing
  • Navigation & Guidance Systems
  • Sonar Systems

Selected Publications

  • Blanford, T. E., Williams, D. P., Park, J. D., Reinhardt, B. T., Dalton, K. S., Johnson, S. F., & Brown, D. C. (2024). An in-air synthetic aperture sonar dataset of target scattering in environments of varying complexity.. Sci Data, 11(1), 1196. doi:10.1038/s41597-024-04050-0

  • Dalton, K. S., Brown, D. C., & Blanford, T. E. (2024). Combining range-general and range-specific techniques for late-time focused image reconstructiona).. JASA Express Lett, 4(3). doi:10.1121/10.0025237

  • Blanford, T. E., Brown, D. C., & Meyer, R. J. (2023). A Comparison of Two Methods for Simulating Spatial Coherence-Based Motion Estimation. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 48(4), 1280-1288. doi:10.1109/joe.2023.3297229

  • Reed, A., Kim, J., Blanford, T., Pediredla, A., Brown, D., & Jayasuriya, S. (2023). Neural Volumetric Reconstruction for Coherent Synthetic Aperture Sonar. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 42(4), 1-20. doi:10.1145/3592141

  • Brown, D. C., & Blanford, T. E. (2023). Near range breakdown of the phase centre approximation. Electronics Letters, 59(12). doi:10.1049/ell2.12777

  • Goehle, G., Cowen, B., Blanford, T. E., Daniel Park, J., & Brown, D. C. (2023). Approximate extraction of late-time returns via morphological component analysis.. J Acoust Soc Am, 153(5), 2838. doi:10.1121/10.0019415

  • Reed, A., Blanford, T., Brown, D. C., & Jayasuriya, S. (2023). SINR: Deconvolving Circular SAS Images Using Implicit Neural Representations. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 17(2), 458-472. doi:10.1109/jstsp.2022.3215849

  • Hoang, T., Dalton, K. S., Gerg, I. D., Blanford, T. E., Brown, D. C., & Monga, V. (2023). Resonant Scattering-Inspired Deep Networks for Munition Detection in 3D Sonar Imagery. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 61, 1-17. doi:10.1109/tgrs.2023.3324223

  • Park, J. D., Goehle, G., Cowen, B., Blanford, T. E., & Brown, D. C. (2023). Assessing the Utility of Multiple Representations for Object Classification. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 61, 1-14. doi:10.1109/tgrs.2023.3279790

  • Blanford, T. E., Garrett, L., Park, J. D., & Brown, D. C. (2022). Leveraging audio hardware for underwater acoustics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 151(4_Supplement), A248-A249. doi:10.1121/10.0011221