Tracking of underwater acoustic tone sources with linear antenna arrays

Abstract

Track determination is a necessary task for a variety of underwater measurement applications, such as measurement of acoustic fields of ships. The use of linear antenna arrays provides great advantages for measurements and tracking. The investigated ship may be equipped by a special sound source of either pulse or tone signal utilized for tracking. The work considers two scenarios involving the case of a tone source. The scenarios are conditioned by parameters of the array and the source, which may vary depending on task. When a source is of relatively high frequency (several thousands Hz), tracking can be based on the dependence of the Doppler frequency shift and bearing on time; in this case, the parameters to be estimated are the ones of the whole track (velocity, traverse instant, etc.). If the source frequency is relatively low (up to 300 Hz), the array is large (greater than a typical distance from the source to the array aperture), the array focusing ability allows to perform the determination of "instant" locations of the source at various instances; estimating of parameters of the track as a whole is then based on the set of the obtained coordinates. The developed methods have been successfully tested using a large amount of experimental data.

The shallow sea experiment with usage of linear hydrophone array

“…Applying of linear antenna in system tracking a tone source is described in work [4] while in our experiment the real sources producing broadband noise are the observed objects.…”

Underwater Acoustic Imaging of the Sea

“…Applying a linear antenna in a system tracking a tone source is described in work (Orlov and Rodionov, 2008), while in our experiment the real sources producing broadband noise are the observed objects (Kozaczka, Grelowska, 2011;Grelowska et al, 2013b;Kozaczka et al, 2007aKozaczka et al, , 2007b.…”