Acoustic Velocity-Independent 2-D DOA Estimation for Underwater Application

—In this paper, an acoustic velocity-independent two-dimensional direction of arrival (2-D DOA) estimation for underwater application is presented to eliminate the effect of the inaccurate acoustic velocity estimation. According to the geometric relationship between the linear arrays, the proposed method employs the cross correlation matrix (CCM) of the data received by three crossed linear arrays to remove the acoustic velocity factor. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is not susceptible to the acoustic velocity. For a single source, the proposed method out-performs the conventional method in all conditions. For multiple sources, there is a little performance degradation for the proposed method compared with the conventional method. However, the proposed method displays a better performance than the conventional method in situations where the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is extremely low or the acoustic velocity estimation error is non-negligible. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the proposed method is lower than that of the conventional method using the same amount of sensors in total, while the performance is still acceptable. © 2022, Posts and Telecom Press Co Ltd. All rights reserved.