Double-Capon and double-MUSICAL for arrival separation and observable estimation in an acoustic waveguide

Abstract

Recent developments in shallow water ocean acoustic tomography propose the use of an original configuration composed of two source-receiver vertical arrays and wideband sources. The recording space thus has three dimensions, with two spatial dimensions and the frequency dimension. Using this recording space, it is possible to build a three-dimensional (3D) estimation space that gives access to the three observables associated with the acoustic arrivals: the direction of departure, the direction of arrivals, and the time of arrival. The main interest of this 3D estimation space is its capability for the separation of acoustic arrivals that usually interfere in the recording space, due to multipath propagation. A 3D estimator called double beamforming has already been developed, although it has limited resolution. In this study, the new 3D high-resolution estimators of double Capon and double MUSICAL are proposed to achieve this task. The ocean acoustic tomography configuration allows a single recording realization to estimate the cross-spectral data matrix, which is necessary to build high-resolution estimators. 3D smoothing techniques are thus proposed to increase the rank of the matrix. The estimators developed are validated on real data recorded in an ultrasonic tank, and their detection performances are compared to existing 2D and 3D methods. © 2012 Le Touzé et al.; licensee Springer.