The performance of a sonar system is closely related to the marine environment and the target characteristics. When dealing with the echoes of a traditional active sonar system, the sonar designers often do not take into account the influence of the environmental information and prior knowledge perceived by sonar receivers, making it difficult to obtain desired processing results. Based on the basic principle and key technology of sonar, this paper proposed a cognition-based intelligent sonar system in theory--cognitive sonar. Cognitive sonar is capable of jointly optimizing the transmission waveform and receiver according to the changes of environment so that its detection and identification performance can be significantly improved.