The detection of buried targets in shallow water is a tough task in the presence of sea-bottom reverberation. Because both target echo and reverberation are caused by the transmitted signal, they are mixed together in both time domain and frequency domain, which makes traditional signal processing methods inefficient. Blind Source Separation (BSS) is expected to isolate the reverberation from the target echo. However, the feasibility should be proved before separation. In this paper, a method based on spatial correlation is proposed to determine whether reverberation and target echo can be separated as different sources. Then, considering the nonstationarity of the reverberation, SONS (Second Order Nonstationary Source Separation) is applied to separate the original received signals. The sea experiment result shows that BSS is not only feasible but also valid to separate target echo and reverberation, and the target echo after BSS is of higher SRR which makes further process more credible.
