Aliasing-free broadband direction of arrival estimation using a frequency-difference technique

Coherent reflection recovery in scattering from the ocean surface using the frequency-difference autoproducta)

The coherence of rough sea-surface-scattered acoustic fields decreases with increasing frequency. The frequency-difference autoproduct, a quadratic product of acoustic fields at nearby frequencies, mimics a genuine field at the difference frequency. In rough-surface scattering, the autoproduct's lower effective frequency decreases the apparent surface roughness, restoring coherent reflection. Herein, the recovery of coherent reflection in sea surface scattering via the frequency-difference autoproduct is examined for data collected off the coast of New Jersey during the Shallow Water '06 (SW06) experiment. An acoustic source at depth 40 m and receiver at depth 24.3 m and range 200 m interrogated 160 independent realizations of the ocean surface. The root mean square surface height h was 0.167 m, and broadcast frequencies were 14-20 kHz, so that 2.5 ≤kh cos θ≤ 3.7 for acoustic wavenumber k and incidence angle θ. Measured autoproducts, constructed from scattered constituent fields, show significant coherent reflection at sufficiently low difference frequencies. Theoretical results, using the Kirchhoff approximation and a non-analytic surface autocorrelation function, agree with experimental findings. The match is improved using a numerical strategy, exploiting the relationship between autoproduct-based coherence recovery, the ocean-surface autocorrelation function, and the ocean-surface height spectrum. Error bars computed from Monte Carlo scattering simulations support the validity of the measured coherence recovery.

Reformulation of frequency-difference matched-field processor for high-frequency known-source localization

Frequency-difference matched-field processing is a high-frequency source localization technique formulated by matching the frequency-difference autoproduct of the measured field and replicas at the difference-frequency. Although it successfully localizes sound sources by sparse vertical array in shallow or deep ocean with an environmental mismatch, there is still some ambiguity in replica modeling and signal processing. Here, the existing conventional processor is modified to match the bandwidth-averaged autoproduct of the measured field with replicas of the bandwidth-averaged autoproduct, or approximately its self-term for the expected source locations. The proposed processor is consistent with the perspective of matched-field processing and can naturally relieve some drawbacks of the existing one, such as low peak or low dynamic range on the ambiguity surface. Numerical tests are carried out in several shallow ocean environments and the source localization using experimental data are performed to confirm the properties of the proposed processor. It is found that the high-frequency diffracted field always leaves traces on its bandwidth-averaged autoproduct field. These high-frequency marks cause a bias in source localization in the presence of a sound speed mismatch even in low difference-frequencies.

Localization of a remote source in a noisy deep ocean sound channel using phase-only matched autoproduct processing

Long-range passive source localization is possible in the deep ocean using phase-only matched autoproduct processing (POMAP) [Geroski and Dowling (2021). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 150, 171-182], an algorithm based on matched field processing that is more robust to environmental mismatch. This paper extends these prior POMAP results by analyzing the localization performance of this algorithm in the presence of environmental noise. The noise rejection performance of POMAP is assessed using both simulated and measured signal data, with noise data based on environmental noise measurements. Herein, signal and noise measurements are from the nominally one-year-long PhilSea10 ocean acoustic propagation experiment. All signals were recorded from a single moored source, placed near the ocean sound channel 129.4 km away from a nearly water-column-spanning distributed vertical line array. The source transmitted linear frequency modulated chirps with nominal bandwidth from 200 to 300 Hz. The noise measurements used in this study were collected in the months after this source stopped transmitting, and synthetic samples of noise are calculated based on the characteristics of this measured noise. The effect that noise rejection algorithms have on the source localization performance of POMAP is also evaluated, but only 1 dB of performance improvement is achieved using these.

Unambiguous broadband direction of arrival estimation based on improved extended frequency-difference method

In this paper, we consider the problem of bearing ambiguity in the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation due to spatial aliasing when the minimum wavelength of the processing broadband signal is less than the element spacing of a uniform linear array (ULA). First, an extended frequency-difference (FD) method is presented. Unlike the existing FD methods, the extended FD signal is constructed by conjugate multiplying a diagonal matrix consisting of steering vectors at high frequency and pre-processing direction with the array sampled signal matrix at low frequency. Then, this paper establishes a decision criterion for distinguishing the aliasing component that varies linearly with frequency in the extended FD space. Finally, an unambiguous broadband DOA estimation method is achieved by suppressing spatial aliasing in the extended FD space. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in low signal-to-noise ratio, low signal-to-interference ratio, and multi-interference conditions. The unambiguous processing ability of the proposed method is further verified in the South China Sea using ship signals in the frequency band of 200 to 700 Hz and a 10-element ULA with a 6.25 m spacing deployed on the seabed.