Estimating and removing colorations from the deconvolved impulse response of an underwater acoustic channel

Abstract

The impulse response (IR) of an acoustic channel can be obtained by cross-correlating the received signal with the broadband excitation signal in unfavorable noise conditions. However, the deconvolved IR is colored by the IRs of the combined electrical equipment. This letter presents a time domain approach using pre-computed filters to whiten the unknown coloration in order to obtain the channel's time domain waveform. The method is validated with an image-source model and the IR of the channel is recovered with spectral root mean square error of −27 dB. Data results obtained from a pool experiment with non-calibrated equipment yield a whitened IR with standard deviation of 0.9 dB (30–68 kHz band).