Underwater reverberation suppression based on non-negative matrix factorisation

Abstract

Reverberation is the main background interference in underwater active sonar target detection that seriously interferes with the extraction of the target highlight echo. In consideration of the difference in the time-frequency distributions of the target highlight echo and reverberation, an underwater reverberation suppression method based on non-negative matrix factorisation is proposed in this study. The Wigner-Ville time-frequency matrix of the underwater target echo is used as the input, and non-negative matrix factorisation is applied to express the time-frequency matrix as a low-rank matrix. The influences of rank selection on the reverberation suppression effect and signal expression of the target highlight echo are analysed. Given that the time-frequency matrix of the target highlight echo cannot be expressed in the low-rank form when transmitting linear frequency modulation signal, this matrix is processed with low-rank preprocessing through matrix rotation. The components of the target highlight echo, which can be expressed in the form of a low-rank matrix, are preserved. By contrast, the components of the reverberation interference, which cannot be represented in such a form, are removed in the underwater target echoes. The simulation and experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively improve the signal-to-reverberation ratio of underwater target echoes.