Accurate Acoustic Signal Parameter Estimation for Marine Geodesy Surveys

ABSTRACT

Acoustic signal parameter estimation is important for diverse marine geodesy surveys and several other applications. However, the received signal from a far-field target characterized by planar wavefront propagation is frequently affected by strong nearby interfering signals. Their presence deteriorates the performance of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for far-field target. In order to enhance the reception of signal from far-field target, the near-field/far-field (NFFF) beamformer is proposed. Such a beamformer optimizes beam pattern for far-field detection by maximizing beamformer output in the direction of the far-field target with the imposed condition to eliminate interfering signals generated in near-field locations. As the interference suppression only occurs at the position of near-field interference, a possible blind zone for far-field detection in conventional methods is not created. The NFFF beamformer is applicable for coherent signals and the scenario with multi interferences. For stationary situation where interferers locations are fixed, the NFFF beamformer computations do not require time updates with associated computational load. Furthermore the proposed method can be extended to several new situations such as acoustic monitoring performed from a stationary platform subjected to water currents, waves, winds and other variables, all of them generating nearby interferences and also to different array configurations including 2D and 3D arrays.

KEYWORDS:

• Beamforming
• DOA estimation
• interference suppression
• marine geodesy
• near-field interference

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their constructive comments.