Real-time tracking of a surface ship using a bottom-mounted horizontal array

Abstract

The cascade of blind deconvolution and array invariant has been successful to localize and track a surface ship radiating random waveforms, using a 56-m long vertical array in 100-m deep shallow water. In this paper, it is shown that a 60-m long, bottom-mounted horizontal array can be utilized for blind deconvolution to extract the Green's functions from the same ship (100–800 Hz), in conjunction with the array invariant for source-range estimation. The additional information obtained with a horizontal array is the source bearing (azimuth angle, ϕ) from the well-resolved ray angle identified for blind deconvolution to extract the phase component of the unknown source waveforms. The overall tracking performance shows good agreement with global positioning system (GPS) measurements to less than 11% in terms of standard deviation of relative range error at ranges of 0.3–1.5 km, except when the ship is around the broadside (e.g., |ϕ|<25°) of the horizontal array. On the other hand, the source bearings are in excellent agreement with the GPS data except near the endfire due to the lower angular resolution. The potential for simultaneous localization of multiple ships is also discussed.