An experimental study on matched field processing in shallow water

I.IntroductionPassiverangeanddepthlocalizationofanacousticsourceinshallowwaterisadifficult,yetinterestingproblemthathasreceivedagreatdealofattentioninthelastfewyears['5].Thesimu1taneousestimationofrangeanddepthrequirestheuseofnumericalpropagationmodels.Theclassicalapproachtothisproblemisto"match"thereceivedacousticdatawiththesoundfieldpredictedbythepropagationmodelforanumberofhypotheticalrange/depthsourcelocatiolls.Thistechniqueiscalledmatchedfieldprocessing.Itiscommonlyacceptedthatthewavepro…

An experimental study on matched field processing in shallow water

Matched field processing (MFP) is a generalized beamforming method which uses the spatial complexities of acoustic field in an ocean waveguide to localize sources in range, depth and azimuth or to infer parameters of the waveguide itself. In the paper, we present simulated and experimental results on narrow-band point source localization in shallow water by the matched field processing of a vertical array. Range-depth ambiguity surfaces are obtained by the spatial correlation of the incident field (modeled or realistic) with a modeled replica of that field. The simulated results indicate that a high-quality ambiguity surface can be obtained in case of perfect match between the "true" environmental parameters and those used to compute the replica field. The effects of mismatches result in a degraded ambiguity surface and incorrect localization. Examples of localizations obtained with real sea test data are presented. It is shown that the conventional methods have better robustness than the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) based method. By employing the reduced minimum variance beamforming (RMVB), we can also get better results.