Underwater Acoustic Source Positioning by Isotropic and Vector Hydrophone Combination

• Published in: Journal of sound and vibration Vol. 501; p. 116031
• Main Authors: Kavoosi, Vali, Dehghani, Mohammad Javad, Javidan, Reza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Ltd 09.06.2021; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustic Vector Hydrophone; Acoustics; Algorithms; Background noise; Direction of arrival; Directivity; DOA Estimation; Global positioning systems; GPS; Heterogeneous Measurements; Hydrophones; Noise; Noise propagation; RSS; Signal processing; Signal strength; Sound sources; Underwater acoustics; Underwater Positioning; Heterogeneous Measurements; DOA Estimation; RSS; Underwater Positioning; Acoustic Vector Hydrophone
• ISSN: 0022-460X; 1095-8568
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jsv.2021.116031

•A positioning system containing an isotropic and a vector hydrophone is proposed.•The DOA is estimated by space-frequency processing of the vector hydrophone's data.•The range is estimated based on the received signal strength and DOA measurements.•A novel noise power estimation algorithm is proposed. Acoustic vector hydrophones are well-known for their ability in estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) of incoming signals. Moreover, despite its directivity, a vector hydrophone is capable of providing information about the received signal strength (RSS), just as an isotropic hydrophone. In this paper, a heterogeneous positioning system consisting of an isotropic and a vector hydrophone is considered and, then, a novel positioning algorithm for localization of an acoustic underwater source located in the near field is developed. In this context, a new efficient algorithm is proposed for DOA estimation by performing the space-frequency processing on the vector hydrophone's data. Then, the range estimation problem is formulated in terms of the Lambert W function by considering the estimated DOA and employing the RSS measurements. In the case where the source is located nearer to the vector hydrophone than to the isotropic hydrophone, a solution for the source range is derived. Furthermore, the estimated range is significantly improved through a novel procedure which eliminates the power of background noise in the measured RSS. Moreover, the effects of shadowing, colored noise, multipath propagation, and mismatch in the channel parameters on the proposed method are investigated. Simulation results indicate reasonable improvement in terms of DOA accuracy compared to the prototype eigenstructure-based algorithm.