Waveguide Invariant-based mitigation of reverberation and interference in active and passive sonar

Abstract

Multipath propagation poses many challenges for broadband sonar signal processing in underwater acoustic channels. The waveguide invariant (WI) provides a useful relation between the temporal and frequency fading characteristics in shallow-water channels that can been exploited to improve broadband target detection in both active and passive sonars. In active sonar, the WI motivates an alternative to conventional constant-false-alarm rate (CFAR) normalization of the background by averaging over observed time-frequency striations to estimate the reverberation level. A WI-based generalized likelihood ratio test is reviewed and shown to outperform conventional cell-averaged and frequency-invariant CFAR detectors in both simulation and with real Mediterranean data. In passive towed-array sonar, targets near endfire are often masked by angularly spread broadband multipath interference whose statistics must be estimated with limited training data for effective suppression. A WI relationship characterizing the frequency-dependence of wavenumber differences permits averaging of narrowband array snapshots to form a low-rank broadband “focused” covariance matrix. Simulation experiments in a realistic ocean environment are reviewed showing that adaptive beamforming using WI focused covariance matrices can provide a significant array gain improvement over conventional adaptive methods with limited observation time. Finally, the potential for waveguide invariant-based blind source separation is discussed. [Work supported by ONR.]