Abstract—Up to now in mine warfare context, most of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) processes suffer from environmental effects and therefore try to erase them by image filtering or thresholding before performing shadow and/or echo extraction of the target. In order to design potentially more effective methods, environmental characterization can be investigated. The idea is to incorporate environmental features in the ATR process or to design it according to environmental characteristics such as seafloor homogeneity or complexity. In this way, this paper study the ability to decompose sidescan sonar images through geometrical structures using the concept of intrinsic dimensionality (iD) and scale-space representations