An Iterative Deconvolution-Time Reversal Method with Noise Reduction, a High Resolution and Sidelobe Suppression for Active Sonar in Shallow Water Environments

Chunxiao Li ,Mei Guo ,Hangfang Zhao

doi:10.3390/s20102844

Chunxiao Li , Mei Guo + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s20102844

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Journal: Sensors	Publication Date: May 16, 2020
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Zhejiang University of Technology, Zhejiang University

Abstract

Matched filtering is widely used in active sonar because of its simplicity and ease of implementation. However, the resolution performance generally depends on the transmitted waveform. Moreover, its detection performance is limited by the high-level sidelobes and seriously degraded in a shallow water environment due to time spread induced by multipath propagation. This paper proposed a method named iterative deconvolution-time reversal (ID-TR), on which the energy of the cross-ambiguity function is modeled, as a convolution of the energy of the auto-ambiguity function of the transmitted signal with the generalized target reflectivity density. Similarly, the generalized target reflectivity density is a convolution of the spread function of channel with the reflectivity density of target as well. The ambiguity caused by the transmitted signal and the spread function of channel are removed by Richardson-Lucy iterative deconvolution and the time reversal processing, respectively. Moreover, this is a special case of the Richardson-Lucy algorithm that the blur function is one-dimensional and time-invariant. Therefore, the iteration deconvolution is actually implemented by the iterative temporal time reversal processing. Due to the iterative time reversal method can focus more and more energy on the strongest target with the iterative number increasing and then the peak-signal power increases, the simulated result shows that the noise reduction can achieve 250 dB in the “ideal” free field environment and 100 dB in a strong multipaths waveguide environment if a 1-ms linear frequency modulation with a 4-kHz frequency bandwidth is transmitted and the number of iteration is 10. Moreover, the range resolution is approximately a delta function. The results of the experiment in a tank show that the noise level is suppressed by more than 70 dB and the reverberation level is suppressed by 3 dB in the case of a single target and the iteration number being 8.

Highlights

Matched filtering (MF) is widely used in active sonar because of its simplicity and ease of implementation [1,2,3,4]
The implementation of the iterative deconvolution-time reversal (ID-TR) filter is a process of iterative time reversal
It has been demonstrated that the time reversal has a superior ability to suppress the reverberation [28,29,30,31,32,33,34]

Summary

Introduction

Matched filtering (MF) is widely used in active sonar because of its simplicity and ease of implementation [1,2,3,4]. The capability of noise reduction, range sidelobe level and range resolution are the three key issues considered by active radar/sonar. The usual way to solve the problems of high sidelobe level or low resolution is radar/sonar waveform design [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. For the current state of art, sidelobe suppression merely by means of waveform design seems to achieve a limit [11]. Other approaches, such as the coherent CLEAN algorithm [12] and coherence factor filtering [13,14]

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Conclusion