"Principal component inverse" algorithm for detection in thepresence of reverberation

Detection in the presence of reverberation is often difficult in active sonar, due to the reflection/diffusion/diffraction of the transmitted signal by the ocean surface, ground, and volume. A modelization of reverberation is often used to improve detection because classical algorithms are inefficient. A commonly used reverberation model is colored and nonstationary noise. This model leads to elaborate detection algorithms which normalize and whiten reverberation. In this paper, we focus on a more deterministic model which considers reverberation as a sum of echoes issued from the transmitted signal. The Principal Component Inverse (PCI) algorithm is used with this model to estimate and delete the reverberation echoes. A rank analysis of the observation matrix shows that PCI is efficient in this configuration under some conditions, such as when the transmitted signal is Frequency Modulated. Both methods are validated with real sonar surface reverberation noise. We show that whitening has poor performance when reverberation and target echo have the same properties, while PCI maintains the same performance whatever the reverberation characteristics. Further, we extend the algorithms to spatio-temporal data. We propose a new algorithm for PCI which allows better echo separation. This new method is shown to be more efficient on real spatio-temporal data     

Morphological and statistical approaches to improve detection in the presence of reverberation

The detection of a target echo in a sonar image is usually a difficult task since the reverberation, consisting of a large number of spurious echoes, generates a lot of false alarms. In this paper, we propose two new detectors derived from image processing algorithms. These detectors are respectively based on a morphological and a statistical contrast. Each detector only requires setting a few parameters. This setting is done using some prior knowledge about the data (shape of the emitted signal and the used antenna, characteristics of the reverberation). Nevertheless, an extensive statistical study of the detection performances proves that the proposed methods are robust and that even an imprecise setting of the parameters leads to satisfactory results. Applied to the real data, these detectors and their sequential combination lead to a significant improvement on the performances: The false alarm rate is drastically reduced while the detection probability is preserved. Based on different contrasts, these detectors have complementary behaviors. Therefore, a further improvement is achieved by a fusion of the different results to classify the remaining echoes as whether spurious or true detection.     

Two-way time spreading and path loss in shallow water at 20-40 kHz

Two-way time spreading and path-loss measurements were collected in water 100 m deep, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Data were collected at frequencies of 20-22 kHz, 27-29 kHz, and 35-37 kHz using linear FM pulses 0.160 s in duration. The source-receiver was an anchored, high-frequency active sonar, and the target was a free-drifting echo repeater. Sonar and target positions were recorded using a portable tracking range. In the paper, two-way time spreading and path loss measurements are compared with modeled estimates obtained using an enhanced version of the generic sonar model (GSM). The GSM estimates of time spreading due to multipath propagation compare favorably with the experimental data. The model indicates that the path loss for individual eigenrays was extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the sound-speed profile. This led to substantial variation in the model output depending on the choice of profile. In place of the model, an empirical estimate of path loss was computed from the data. We obtained a two-way spreading loss of 2[18.4log₁₀(R)] where R is the range from sonar to target. The data were also used to compute the standard deviation of the received echo intensity at each frequency. The standard deviation was computed two different ways. First it was computed using the peak echo level from each of the pulses at a given frequency. Then, it was computed from the total energy received from each of the pings. At all frequencies, the standard deviation was 1-2 dB lower when computed from the total received energy     

Signal recovery in a reverberation-limited environment

The problem of recovering signals masked by reverberation is considered. Reverberation data from a shallow-water active sonar experiment in conjunction with simulated echoes are used to examine the potential for signal recovery offered by adaptive filtering and prediction. The deterministic least squares lattice filter is the central adaptive estimator of choice. The prediction error lattice is used to selectively "whiten" the composite process by controlling the algorithm adaptation speed. This is shown to result in significant signal enhancement for low-Doppler echoes masked by reverberation. Adaptive noise canceling with multiple reference beams is shown to be successful in extracting even zero-Doppler echoes from the reverberation background.     

Seafloor profiling by a wideband sonar: simulation,frequency-response optimization, and results of a brief sea test

An ahead-looking probe of some kind, optical or acoustic, is critical when one is attempting seafloor exploration from a mobile platform. A single-frequency, split aperture sonar system can be used for this purpose, but a wideband monopulse sonar offers many advantages. It computes a running estimate of the vertical directional cosine of the source of the echo, and can thus reveal the positions of multiple wave scatterers as long as their echoes can still be time resolved. Theoretical studies of its performance have been made previously, but were directly applicable only to extremely simple seafloor geometries. A new time-domain digital simulation that largely circumvents this limitation has been developed. The simulation also provides a means for testing the theory and optimizing system parameters. The reverberation model does not account for some features of acoustic backscattering such as diffraction, but it is believed to be adequate for the investigation of most signal processing aspects of the sonar system. The theory of the simulation is developed and several examples are presented and discussed. In addition, some preliminary results are presented from a sea test that used the air-sea interface as a surrogate seafloor     

Statistical characterization of active sonar reverberation using extreme value theory

The statistics of reverberation in active sonar are characterized by non-Rayleigh distributed amplitudes in the normalized matched filter output. Unaccounted for, this property can lead to high false-alarm rates in fixed-threshold detectors. A new approach to modeling threshold-crossing statistics based on extreme value theory is proposed, which uses the generalized Pareto distribution as the unique asymptotic model of the tail distribution, valid at large thresholds. Methods of parameter estimation are discussed and applied to active sonar reverberation collected on a hull-mounted sonar system. The statistics of reverberation in active sonar are found to generally have a power-law behavior in the tails with a shape parameter that is persistent in time and bandwidth dependent. The threshold needed for accurate parameter estimation is generally found to be well below that of typical fixed-threshold detectors.     

Range and Doppler information from fourth-order spectra

In an active sonar system setting, a novel method is evaluated that extracts range and Doppler information from a Doppler-spread active sonar echo. The Doppler spreading is based on H. Van Trees' (1971) Gaussian amplitude modulating model, and the new method is based on the Fourier transform of a special case of the fourth-order cumulant. Specifically, from the envelope of the Gaussian amplitude modulated echo of a transmitted coded pulse train, the second-order spectrum and the Fourier transform of a special case of the fourth-order cumulant are derived and analyzed for this ability to extract range and Doppler information. It is shown that the method can theoretically extract range and Doppler information without degradation. The reason for this result is that a special case of the fourth-order cumulant is independent of the covariance of the Gaussian amplitude modulating function. These methods are also simulated and compared with the simulated results of the range-Doppler ambiguity function. This shows that the ambiguity function and the second-order spectrum are degraded due to the Gaussian amplitude modulation. The results are further demonstrated by simulating the three range-Doppler extraction methods for the received echo in noise     

Signal excess in K-distributed reverberation

Active sonar systems have recently been developed using larger arrays and broad-band sources to counter the detrimental effects of reverberation in shallow-water operational areas. Increasing array size and transmit waveform bandwidth improve the signal-to-noise ratio-and-reverberation power ratio (SNR) after matched filtering and beamforming by reducing the size of the range-bearing resolution cell and, thus, decreasing reverberation power levels. This can also have the adverse effect of increasing the tails of the probability density function (pdf) of the reverberation envelope, resulting in an increase in the probability of a false alarm. Using a recently developed model relating the number of scatterers in a resolution cell to a K-distributed reverberation envelope, the effect of increasing bandwidth (i.e., reducing the resolution cell size) on detection performance is examined for additive nonfluctuating and fluctuating target models. The probability of detection for the two target models is seen to be well approximated by that for a shifted gamma variate with matching moments. The approximations are then used to obtain the SNR required to meet a probability of detection and false-alarm performance specification (i.e., the detection threshold). The required SNR is then used to determine that, as long as the target and scatterers are not over-resolved, decreasing the size of the resolution cell always results in an improvement in performance. Thus, the increase in SNR obtained by increasing bandwidth outweighs the accompanying increase in false alarms resulting from heavier reverberation distribution tails for K-distributed reverberation. The amount of improvement is then quantified by the signal excess, which is seen to be as low as one decibel per doubling of bandwidth when the reverberation is severely non-Rayleigh, as opposed to the expected 3-dB gain when the reverberation is Rayleigh distributed.     

A programmable microcomputer-based sonar echo processor for real-time processing

A programmable microcomputer-based sonar echo processor has been developed and field tested to process echo data in real time. The device was designed for use in fisheries acoustics and to analyze echoes from the sea floor. The instrument simultaneously performs the functions "echo integration" and "echo peak detection' on the sonar signal. The "echo integration" circuitry measures the relative acoustic energy of the echo while the "echo peak detection' electronics measure the probability density function (PDF) of the peak of the echo envelope. Each process is gated so the echoes may be processed in many short time intervals. In fisheries applications, estimates can be made of fish density (fish per unit volume), average backscattering cross section, and a combination of fish size and behavior. When using the device to analyze bottom echoes, it is possible to measure both the returned energy from the bottom sediment interfaces and the microrelief characteristics. The durability, flexibility, computer link, and floppy-disk data-storage features of the system are discussed. Data are presented of the processed echoes from biological organisms and the ocean bottom from a recent research cruise on the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Hatteras, NC. The biological results illustrated the organisms to be clearly divided into two separate spatial distributions-an observation not obvious from a standard echogram which was simultaneously used. The results from the bottom showed both 1) the difference in sub-bottom structure between two locations and 2) changes in microrelief of the water-bottom interface between another pair of locations.     

Enhanced Kalman Filter Algorithm Using the Invariance Principle

Target tracking in multistatic active sonar systems is often limited in shallow-water environments due to the high level of bottom reverberation that produces false detections. Past research has shown that these false alarms may be mitigated when complete knowledge of the environment is available for discrimination, but these methods are not robust to environmental uncertainty. Recent work has demonstrated the existence of a waveguide invariant for active sonar geometries. Since this parameter is independent of specifics of the environment, it may be used when the environment is poorly known. In this paper, the invariance extended Kalman filter (IEKF) is proposed as a new tracking algorithm that incorporates dynamic frequency information in the state vector and uses the invariance relation to improve tracker discrimination. IEKF performance is quantified with both simulated and experimental sonar data and results show that the IEKF tracks the target better than the conventional extended Kalman filter (CEKF) in the presence of false detections.      

Fast maximum likelihood estimation of signal parameters using theshape of the compressed likelihood function

A computationally efficient fast maximum-likelihood (FML) estimation scheme, which makes use of the shape of the surface of the compressed likelihood function (CLF), is proposed. The scheme uses only multiple one-dimensional searches oriented along appropriate ridges on the surface of the CLF. Simulations indicate that the performances of the proposed estimators match those of the corresponding maximum-likelihood estimators with very high probability. The approach is demonstrated by applying it to two different problems. The first problem involves the estimation of time of arrival and Doppler compression of a wideband hyperbolic frequency modulated (HFM) active sonar signal buried in reverberation. The second problem deals with estimating the frequencies of sinusoids. A threshold analysis of the proposed scheme is carried out to predict the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at which large estimation errors begin to occur, i.e., the threshold SNR, and its computational complexity is discussed     

Mean–Standard Deviation Representation of Sonar Images for Echo Detection: Application to SAS Images

This paper addresses the detection of underwater mines echoes with application to synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imaging. A detection method based on local first- and second-order statistical properties of the sonar images is proposed. It consists of mapping the data onto the mean-standard deviation plane highlighting these properties. With this representation, an adaptive thresholding of the data enables the separation of the echoes from the reverberation background. The procedure is automated using an entropy criterion (setting of a threshold). Applied on various SAS data sets containing both proud and buried mines, the proposed method positively compares to the conventional amplitude threshold detection method. The performances are evaluated by means of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.     

Simulation of non-Rayleigh reverberation and clutter

The simulation of active sonar reverberation time series has traditionally been done using either a computationally intensive point-scatterer model or a Rayleigh-distributed reverberation-envelope model with a time-varying power level. Although adequate in scenarios where reverberation arises from a multitude of scatterers, the Rayleigh model is not representative of the target-like non-Rayleigh reverberation or clutter commonly observed with modern high-resolution sonar systems operating in shallow-water environments. In this paper, techniques for simulating non-Rayleigh reverberation are developed within the context of the finite-number-of-scatterers representation of K-distributed reverberation, which allows control of the reverberation-envelope statistics as a function of system (beamwidth and bandwidth) and environmental (scatterer density and size) parameters. To avoid the high computational effort of the point-scatterer model, reverberation is simulated at the output of the matched filter and is generated using efficient approximate methods for forming K-distributed random variables. Finite impulse response filters are used to introduce the effects of multipath propagation and the shape of the reverberation power spectrum, the latter of which requires the development of a prewarping of the K distribution parameters to control the reverberation-envelope statistics. The simulation methods presented in this paper will be useful in the testing and evaluation of active sonar signal processing algorithms, as well as for simulation-based research on the effects of the sonar system and environment on the reverberation-envelope probability density function.     

数字式主动声呐研制的初步探索

首先介绍数字式主动声呐的优点及实现上的特殊困难．采用时间相关积累信号处理方法，可以克服海洋背景噪声和船只自噪声的干扰，并具有强烈的抗起伏性能．在垂直向下探测或短距离、高频探测等特殊条件下，依混响的衰减规律，由微机组成精确的灵敏度时间控制网络，可以抑制混响的影响，并大大地简化了目标识别的难题．回声测深仪、垂直探鱼仪及本文介绍的浅海航行暗礁障碍探测仪的研制和海上实验，说明了这个结论．     

声相关海流剖面仪测速研究

声相关海流剖面仪(ACCP)适合深海测速,能够测得相对海底的绝对速度。文章在前人工作基础上,以声纳方程为基础,构造海底混响回波仿真模型,并对基于K irchhoff近似和利用微扰法的R ay le igh-R ice近似相结合的散射模型赋予新的物理意义,并将其应用到声相关测速仿真研究过程中,使仿真更加接近于海洋的实际环境。文章利用H ilbert变换进行包络检波来减小测速误差,并且根据接收信噪比得到了不同航速时能够达到最大底跟踪的距离,这与参考文献给出的结果是一致的。     

Biomimetic sonar locates and recognizes objects

An active sonar is described that adaptively changes its location and configuration in response to the echoes it observes in order to locate an object, position it at a known location, and identify it using features extracted from the echoes. The sonar consists of a center transmitter flanked by two receivers that can rotate and is positioned at the end of a robot arm that has five degree-of-freedom mobility. The sonar operates in air using Polaroid transducers that are resonant at 60 kHz with a nominal wavelength equal to 6 mm. The emitted pulse has a short duration with a useful bandwidth extending from 20 to 130 kHz. Using binaural information, the transmitter rotates to position an echo-producing object on its axis to maximize the acoustic intensity incident on the nearest echo-producing feature. The receivers rotate to maximize the echo amplitude and bandwidth. These optimizations are useful for differentiating objects. The system recognizes a collection of ball bearings, machine washers, and rubber O-rings of different sizes ranging from 0.45 to 2.54 cm, some differing by less than 1 mm in diameter. Learning is accomplished by extracting vectors of 32 echo envelope values acquired during a scan in elevation and forming a data base. Recognition is accomplished by comparing a single observed echo vector with the data base to find the least squared error match. A bent-wire paper clip illustrates the recognition of an asymmetric pose-dependent object     

Statistical normalization of spherically invariant non-Gaussian clutter

Conventional detection in active sonar involves comparing the normalized matched filter output power to a fixed preset threshold. Threshold crossings from contacts of interest are labeled as detections and those from undesired clutter echoes as false alarms. To maintain a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) in the presence of strong transient clutter, the system can either increase the threshold or apply some function that suppresses this background down to an acceptable level. The latter approach leads to a more consistent background on the display, which enables operator-assisted detection. Background clutter suppression should not come at the expense of contact detection; to maximize the probability of detection (PD) for a given probability of false alarm (PFA), the likelihood ratio test (LRT) is used. However, the LRT does not address display issues, since the threshold that achieves a desired PFA varies with the input distribution. Ideally, the LRT output is monotonically transformed using a "statistical normalizer" (SN) that returns a consistent CFAR background without degrading the optimized PD. Within the radar community, clutter suppression is proposed using a LRT tuned to a K-distributed spherically invariant random vector (SIRV) model. However, this model does not lend itself to SN, as a closed-form expression for the LRT output density does not exist. In contrast, the proposed SIRV clutter model, with Pareto distributed power, leads to a closed-form density from which the SN function is readily derived. This combined Pareto-LRT/SN detector nearly matches the optimized PD performance of the K-distributed LRT and maintains a consistent CFAR background for display purposes.     

Differential phase estimation with the SeaMARCII bathymetricsidescan sonar system

A maximum-likelihood estimator is used to extract differential phase measurements from noisy seafloor echoes received at pairs of transducers mounted on either side of the SeaMARC II bathymetric sidescan sonar system. Carrier frequencies for each side are about 1 kHz apart, and echoes from a transmitted pulse 2 ms long are analyzed. For each side, phase difference sequences are derived from the full complex data consisting of base-banded and digitized quadrature components of the received echoes. With less bias and a lower variance, this method is shown to be more efficient than a uniform mean estimator. It also does not exhibit the angular or time ambiguities commonly found in the histogram method used in the SeaMARC II system. A figure for the estimation uncertainty of the phase difference is presented, and results are obtained for both real and simulated data. Based on this error estimate and an empirical verification derived through coherent ping stacking, a single filter length of 100 ms is chosen for data processing applications     

Acoustic stereo images of the bottom surface

In order to enhance the efficiency of the interpretation of surface images obtained with a side scanning sonar, it is proposed to supplement the standard processing software with a program for obtaining acoustic stereo images. Examples of such images synthesized with this program using the data of a bottom sonar survey with a side scanning sonar and an echo sounder are presented. The cases are considered when the information on the bottom relief contained in sonar images obtained with a standard side scanning sonar or its modifications can be used instead of the data of an echo sounding survey.     

基于虚警函数的侧扫声纳水下目标实时检测方法

研究了侧扫声纳系统进行水下目标探测过程中目标信号的检测问题。通过分析海底回波信号的统计模型及其参数的估计,讨论了目标信号对统计模型拟合的影响规律,提出了侧扫声纳回波信号虚警函数和虚警率的概念,及其对Ping信号中目标信号的检测方法。算例结果表明,回波信号的三种分布模型中K分布拟合程度最优,在相同虚警率的条件下,基于K分布的虚警函数目标检测率最高。该法可为侧扫声纳回波信号中目标的实时报警提供技术支撑。