Acoustic Blind Deconvolution and Unconventional Nonlinear Beamforming in Shallow Ocean Environments

Abstract

Abstract : The overall long-term goal for this project is to develop engineering tools that are useful to the Navy as it operates in uncertain, partially known, or unknown ocean environments. During the last year, this project has focused on further determining the utility of a fully passive propagation-physics-based technique for blind deconvolution of array-recorded sounds from a remote source with emphasis on determining how sparse-array measurements might be used for this task, and how source-to-array range information can be robustly extracted from the deconvolution process. The long term goals of this project are: i) to determine the effectiveness of synthetic time reversal (STR) for the purposes of blind deconvolution in noisy unknown ocean sound channels, ii) to effectively apply STR to marine mammal sounds recorded in the ocean with vertical and/or horizontal arrays, and iii) to utilize the STR-estimated signals and ocean-sound-channel impulse responses to classify, localize, and/or track individual marine mammals (or other sound sources) of interest. Progress this year has primarily been made toward goals ii) and iii).