A New Method for Matched Field Localization Based on Two-Hydrophone

The conventional matched field processing (MFP) uses large vertical arrays to locate an underwater acoustic target. However, the use of large vertical arrays increases equipment and computational cost, and causes some problems such as element failures, and array tilting to degrade the localization performance. In this paper, the matched field localization method using two-hydrophone is proposed for underwater acoustic pulse signals with an unknown emitted signal waveform. Using the received signal of hydrophones and the ocean channel pulse response which can be calculated from an acoustic propagation model, the spectral matrix of the emitted signal for different source locations can be estimated by employing the method of frequency domain least squares. The resulting spectral matrix of the emitted signal for every grid region is then multiplied by the ocean channel frequency response matrix to generate the spectral matrix of replica signal. Finally, the matched field localization using two-hydrophone for underwater acoustic pulse signals of an unknown emitted signal waveform can be estimated by comparing the difference between the spectral matrixes of the received signal and the replica signal. The simulated results from a shallow water environment for broadband signals demonstrate the significant localization performance of the proposed method. In addition, the localization accuracy in five different cases are analyzed by the simulation trial, and the results show that the proposed method has a sharp peak and low sidelobes, overcoming the problem of high sidelobes in the conventional MFP due to lack of the number of elements.