Abstract:This paper aims at estimating the azimuth, range and depth of
a cooperative broadband acoustic source with a single vector sensor in a multipath underwater environment, where
the received signal is assumed a linear combination of echoes of the source emitted waveform.
A vector sensor is a
device that measures the scalar acoustic pressure field and the
vectorial acoustic particle velocity field at a single location in space. The amplitudes of the echoes in the vector sensor components allow to determine their azimuth and elevation. Assuming that the environmental conditions of the channel are known, source range and depth are obtained from the estimates of elevation and relative time delays
of the different echoes using a ray based backpropagation
algorithm. The proposed method is tested using simulated data, and is further applied
to experimental data from the Makai'05 experiment, where 8-14 kHz chirp signals were acquired by a vector sensor array.
It is shown that for short ranges the position of the source is estimated in agreement with the geometry of the experiment.
The method is low computational demanding, thus well suited to be used in mobile and light platforms
where space and power requirements are limited.