Open-Lake Experimental Investigation of Azimuth Angle Estimation Using a Single Acoustic Vector Sensor

Anbang Zhao,Xuejie Bi,Juan Hui,Caigao Zeng,Lin Ma

doi:10.1155/2018/4324902

Abstract

Five well-known azimuth angle estimation methods using a single acoustic vector sensor (AVS) are investigated in open-lake experiments. A single AVS can measure both the acoustic pressure and acoustic particle velocity at a signal point in space and output multichannel signals. The azimuth angle of one source can be estimated by using a single AVS in a passive sonar system. Open-lake experiments are carried out to evaluate how these different techniques perform in estimating azimuth angle of a source. The AVS that was applied in these open-lake experiments is a two-dimensional accelerometer structure sensor. It consists of two identical uniaxial velocity sensors in orthogonal orientations, plus a pressure sensor—all in spatial collocation. These experimental results indicate that all these methods can effectively realize the azimuth angle estimation using only one AVS. The results presented in this paper reveal that AVS can be applied in a wider range of application in distributed underwater acoustic systems for passive detection, localization, classification, and so on.

Highlights

Research on underwater acoustic systems has been receiving an increasing attention in both military and civilian applications [1,2,3,4]
To evaluate and compare the practical application performance of the five investigated acoustic vector sensors (AVS) azimuth angle estimation methods, we carried out serial open-lake experiments in Danjiangkou Reservoir from April to June 2016
Comparing the results of the five methods in detail, we note that all the five methods investigated in this paper can effectively realize the azimuth angle estimation by using a single AVS

Summary

Introduction

Research on underwater acoustic systems has been receiving an increasing attention in both military and civilian applications [1,2,3,4]. Compared with acoustic pressure sensors (a.k.a. scalar hydrophone), acoustic vector sensors (AVS) can simultaneously measure the acoustic pressure along with acoustic particle velocity at a signal point in space [1, 3]. Better detection effectiveness and higher estimation precision can be achieved by fully making use of the pressure and the additional particle velocity information [5]. AVSs have been increasingly extended to multiple research fields, such as feature extraction of underwater target signal [8], underwater target tracking [1], underwater acoustic communication [9, 10], acoustic focusing and shielding [3, 11], and geoacoustic inversion problem [12]. Experimental investigation of the AVS signal processing methods is very important in practical engineering applications

Methods

Results

Conclusion