A Study on Pulse Train Waveforms for High Duty Cycle Sonar Systems: Optimization Scheme and Relationship Between Orthogonality and Bandwidth

Detection performance analysis of sub-band processing continuous active sonar

Recent advances in transducer and computing technology have pushed the concept of continuous active sonar (CAS) or high duty cycle sonar as an area of interest for application to antisubmarine warfare. Unlike conventional pulsed active sonars, CAS processing aims at detecting echoes while transmitting with a nearly 100% duty cycle. This paper describes the signal processing chain developed at the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), La Spezia, Italy, for real-time CAS processing within an autonomous networked multistatic sonar system. The algorithm uses subband processing, which can potentially provide a higher target update rate than the traditional pulsed active sonar, while maintaining the same search radius. The higher rate of contact information can improve target tracking performance. Performance results are given from the COLLAB-NGAS14 sea trial where the CAS processor was deployed on two autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) acting as receivers of the CMRE experimental multistatic demonstrator. Results show the feasibility of the CAS concept in littoral scenarios, using AUVs as real-time receivers.

Continuous active sonar (CAS) is a special case of active sonar where the ping duration approaches the ping repetition interval. Sub-band processing is a method of breaking up the long-duration CAS transmission to achieve faster processing update rates than pulsed active sonar (PAS). This paper compares experimental signal-to-reverberation ratio (SRR) measured for CAS and PAS echoes. The processing bandwidth was varied, and the processing integration time was proportional to the bandwidth because linear frequency modulated (LFM) pulses were employed. The data were collected during back-to-back CAS and PAS runs during the TREX13 sea trial, which was conducted in shallow, 20-m water near the shore of Florida, USA. Sub-band processing was applied to the CAS data as well as to the PAS data to allow comparison, although for PAS the increased updates are not at equal intervals over the ping cycle as in CAS. Increasing the number of sub-bands increases the update rate, but the corresponding decrease in bandwidth is expected to reduce SRR. Examining the trade off between update rate and SRR is an important first step in understanding how CAS performs in the littoral environment.

Underwater multi-targets tracking has always been a difficult problem in active sonar tracking systems. In order to estimate the parameters of time-varying multi-targets moving in underwater environments, based on the Bayesian filtering framework, the Random Finite Set (RFS) is introduced to multi-targets tracking, which not only avoids the problem of data association in multi-targets tracking, but also realizes the estimation of the target number and their states simultaneously. Usually, the conventional Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) and Cardinalized Probability Hypothesis Density (CPHD) algorithms assume that the detection probability is known as a priori, which is not suitable in many applications. Some methods have been proposed to estimate the detection probability, but most assume that it is constant both in time and surveillance region. In this paper, we model the detection probability through the active sonar equation. When fixed the false detection probability, we can get the analytic expression for the detection probability, which is related to target position. In addition, this novel detection probability is used in PHD and CPHD algorithms and applied to underwater active sonar tracking systems. Also, we use the adaptive ellipse gate strategy to reduce the computational load in PHD and CPHD algorithms. Under the linear Gaussian assumption, the proposed detection probability is illustrated in both Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) and Gaussian Mixture Cardinalized Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-CPHD), respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed Pd-GM-PHD and Pd-GM-CPHD algorithms are more realistic and accuratein underwater active sonar tracking systems.

Aiming at the issue that in view of the common underwater target electric field detection and localization technology, its electric signal attenuation in the water is faster and easy to be affected by the underwater complex environmental noise, which affects the detection performance of the problem, the paper carries out a research based on active and passive electric field detection and localization technology. First, a target electric field detection and localization system is designed. Then, two sets of basis functions in the horizontal and vertical directions are derived based on this detection system model, and then the detection and localization of underwater targets are realized by energy calculation. Finally, the image fusion algorithm of wavelet transform is adopted to further realize the detection and localization of underwater targets in a two-dimensional plane through the form of a heatmap. All the above contents are experimentally verified by simulation tools, and the experimental results show that compared with the traditional electric field detection and localization techniques for underwater targets, the method in this paper has better performance in the environment with a lower signal-to-noise ratio.

It is anticipated that high duty cycle (HDC) sonars will typically maintain the same bandwidth as the pulsed active sonars (PASs) that they might replace. This will significantly increase their time–bandwidth product, but may not produce the increased gain anticipated, if there are coherence limitations of the acoustic channel. To compare performance of HDC with conventional PAS in the littorals, a set of experiments was conducted as part of the Target and Reverberation Experiment in spring 2013 (TREX13). This paper presents the results of an examination of short-range single surface-reflection echoes, and longer range target echoes from an air hose. The Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient (Pearson's $R$ ) was used to confirm significance of the results. Measurements showed that for an 18-s HDC pulse, the mean (coherent) component of the specular arrival decreased by as much as 5 dB as root mean square (rms) surface roughness increased, whereas the 0.5-s PAS pulse echoes showed no correlation with roughness. The standard deviations of the mean levels were used to examine the incoherent (scattered) component of the specular arrivals. The incoherent component of the specular arrival increased with the product of the surface correlation length and the square of the rms roughness, for both HDC and PAS, with the PAS data having a 1-dB higher standard deviation. A normal mode propagation model and a rough surface scattering model used in conjunction with a simple model that accounts for coherence loss from the matched filter were successfully used to interpret the results.

Several review articles on sonar system technology have provided a detailed description of the mainstream sonar signal processing functions along with the associated implementation considerations. This chapter attempts to extend the scope of these articles by introducing an implementation effort of nonmainstream processing schemes in real-time sonar systems. It provides a historical overview of sonar systems and introduces the concept of the signal processor unit and its general capabilities. The chapter discusses the sonar problem and introduces the development of a realizable generic processing scheme that allows the implementation and testing of nonlinear processing techniques in a wide spectrum of real-time active and passive sonar systems. It presents a concept demonstration of both the sonar technology and advanced signal processing concepts that are proving invaluable in the reduction risk and in ensuing significant innovations occur during the formal development process.

Active sonar systems can provide good target detection potential but are limited in shallow water environments by the high level of reverberation produced by the interaction between the acoustic signal and the ocean bottom. The nature of the reverberation is highly variable and depends critically on the ocean and seabed properties, which are typically poorly known. This has motivated interest in techniques that are invariant to the environment. In passive sonar, a scalar parameter termed the waveguide invariant, has been introduced to describe the slope of striations observed in lofargrams. In this work, an invariant for active sonar is introduced. This active invariant is shown to be present in the time-frequency structure observed in sonar data from the Malta Plateau, and the structure agrees with results produced from normal mode simulations. The application of this feature in active tracking algorithms is discussed.

In this paper, the author discusses a Broadband Bionic Sonar Sensor System and a signal processing technique for detection and identification of underwater targets. This bionic sonar system with the resonance detection technique for detection and identification of underwater objects appears to mimic a dolphin's sensory system. The dolphin's sonar system transmits a very short broadband pulse. It detects and classifies a target by processing the modulation of the echo's (back scattering) broadband spectrum. This spectral modulation is directly related to the target's natural resonance. Using the G-Transform technique, the author has successfully showed that target resonance exists and it is unique to target size, shape, structure and material composition. Furthermore, this natural resonance exists in both (active sonar) acoustic echoes, back scattering and (passive sonar) acoustic scattering in acoustic noise background. Using trained neural networks, these targets' resonances/signatures can be correctly identified for the respective targets. It is conceivable that a broadband radar system, similar to a dolphin's sonar system, can be developed for targets and subsurface targets.© (1999) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Active Doppler sonar systems are gaining popularity as a method to profile remotely the oceanic velocity field. Estimation of the variance with which an ideal single.beam sonar system measures relative Doppler motion is the subject of this paper. Theoretical formulations, simulated reverberation data, and sea data are considered to determine this variance. The sea data considered in this paper were selected carefully to avoid performance degrading physical/instrumental phenomena and bias corrected to remove further instrumental effects. Asymptotic performance, determined in this research, is realized when instrumental and physical phenomena do not measurably affect experimental performance. Oceanic and simulated data sets are processed with several velocity-estimation algorithms that are implemented in existing sonar systems. These algorithms are compared against each other and the velocity-estimation standard-deviation results tabulated. The algorithms are shown to possess similar performance characteristics when simulated, and sea data are processed in spite of the fact that some of these algorithms are suboptimal from a theoretical viewpoint. The results of this study show that the asymptotic performance of the Doppler system examined is approximately 25 percent above a theoretical lower bound.

Marine mammals use sound for critical life functions through passive listening and, in some species, active sonar. Major recent advances have been made in understanding what sounds they make, how they hear, and how noise affects their hearing, behavior, and physiology. While data are lacking for whole groups, notably baleen whales, direct hearing measurements are available for most taxa. Some species, such as odontocete cetaceans, hear extremely broad frequency ranges, well into ultrasonic biosonar frequencies. Pinnipeds have more limited frequency ranges but are adapted for aerial and underwater hearing. Indirect data suggest whales use and are more sensitive to low frequencies. For most species, quite high received sound levels are required to temporarily or permanently affect hearing. Direct experimental measurements of behavioral responses have revealed strong species and context dependencies, with factors such as proximity, novelty, and spatial relationships influencing response probability as well as relative loudness. For active surveillance sonar systems operating in the 30-200 kHz range, whales and otariid pinnipeds are of much less concern in terms of audibility and potential behavioral disturbance than phocid pinniped and odontocete cetaceans, notably porpoises. Hearing loss or other injuries from such systems are quite unlikely in almost all practical scenarios.

Active sonar systems are one of the most commonly used acoustic devices for underwater equipment. They use observed signals, which mainly include target echo signals and reverberation, to detect, track, and locate underwater targets. Reverberation is the primary background interference for active sonar systems, especially in shallow sea environments. It is coupled with the target echo signal in both the time and frequency domain, which significantly complicates the extraction and analysis of the target echo signal. To combat the effect of reverberation, an attention and cepstrum analysis-guided network (ACANet) is proposed. The baseline system of the ACANet consists of a one-dimensional (1D) convolutional module and a reconstruction module. These are used to perform nonlinear mapping and to reconstruct clean spectrograms, respectively. Then, since most underwater targets contain multiple highlights, a cepstrum analysis module and a multi-head self-attention module are deployed before the baseline system to improve the reverberation suppression performance for multi-highlight targets. The systematic evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm effectively suppresses the reverberation in observed signals and greatly preserves the highlight structure. Compared with NMF methods, the proposed ACANet no longer requires the target echo signal to be low-rank. Thus, it can better suppress the reverberation in multi-highlight observed signals. Furthermore, it demonstrates superior performance over NMF methods in the task of reverberation suppression for single-highlight observed signals. It creates favorable conditions for underwater platforms, such as unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), to carry out underwater target detection and tracking tasks.

In this paper, the effect of channel phase coherence upon a matched filter envelope detector output is investigated for a pulsed radar or active sonar. A novel model for the correlated channel phases allows the explicit calculation of the loss in detection performance using the deflection criteria. The theoretical model yields good agreement with simulations when the phase correlation coefficients between the first and last pulses are between 0.1 and 1.0. It is shown that a 3-dB loss in performance, as compared to the optimum detector for perfect coherence, requires phase correlation between adjacent pulses of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\rho_{i,i+1} = 0.91</tex> , 0.96, and 0.96 for 10, 20, and 30 pulses, respectively. On the other hand, the same performance is obtained with a noncoherent combiner of the matched filter pulse returns when correlation between adjacent pulses, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\rho_{i,i+1} = 0.8</tex> , 0.835, and 0.84 for 10, 20, and 30 pulses, respectively. If <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\rho_{i,i+1}</tex> is smaller than these quantities, one is better off performing noncoherent detection.

Ultrasound (US)-enhanced microbubble (MB) therapy has been investigated as a therapeutic technique to facilitate the thrombolysis for the treatment of pericardial and microvascular obstruction. This study sought to assess the therapeutic effects of long-pulsed US-assisted MB-mediated recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) thrombolysis in a rat model of platelet-rich thrombus. Ferric chloride (10%) was used to induce total arterial occlusion before formation of platelet-rich thrombi. Therapeutic long-tone-burst US (1 MHz, 0.6 MPa, 1,000-µs pulse length) was used, and 2.9×109/mL of lipid MBs and 1 mg/mL of rt-PA were infused. Subsequently, 42 Sprague-Dawley (SD) male rats were randomly divided into seven groups: (I) control; (II) rt-PA; (III) high duty cycle US + MB; (IV) low duty cycle US + rt-PA; (V) high duty cycle US + rt-PA; (VI) low duty cycle US + rt-PA + MB; and (VII) high duty cycle US + rt-PA + MB. The recanalization grades were evaluated after 20 minutes' treatment. Compared to the control, there was significant improvement in recanalization in the US + rt-PA groups (P=0.01 vs. control), US (low duty cycle) + rt-PA + MB (P=0.003 vs. control) and US (high duty cycle) + rt-PA + MB (P<0.001 vs. control) groups, in which recanalization was successfully achieved in all rats. Long-pulsed US-enhanced MB-mediated rt-PA thrombolysis offered a powerful approach in the treatment of platelet-rich thrombus.

The passive and active sonar equations are reviewed with regard to the definitions of individual terms and their units. It is shown on the one hand that ambiguities exist in conventional definitions that can lead to misinterpretation, and on the other that under special conditions correction terms are needed that are not included in the standard equations. Revised definitions are proposed that remove the need for some of the correction terms and reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding. Particular emphasis is placed on the terms 'propagation loss' and 'source level' for both active and passive sonar. For example, the effect on changes in impedance between the source and receiver of the sound is considered in the case of passive sonar, and between the source, receiver and scatterer of sound in the case of active sonar.