Multiple Source Localization in a Shallow Water Waveguide Exploiting Subarray Beamforming and Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to be effective for single sound source localization in shallow water environments. However, multiple source localization is a more challenging task because of the interactions among multiple acoustic signals. This paper proposes a framework for multiple source localization on underwater horizontal arrays using deep neural networks. The two-stage DNNs are adopted to determine both the directions and ranges of multiple sources successively. A feed-forward neural network is trained for direction finding, while the long short term memory recurrent neural network is used for source ranging. Particularly, in the source ranging stage, we perform subarray beamforming to extract features of sources that are detected by the direction finding stage, because subarray beamforming can enhance the mixed signal to the desired direction while preserving the horizontal-longitudinal correlations of the acoustic field. In this way, a universal model trained in the single-source scenario can be applied to multi-source scenarios with arbitrary numbers of sources. Both simulations and experiments in a range-independent shallow water environment of SWellEx-96 Event S5 are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

DOA Estimation for UCAs Based on Virtual Subarray Beamforming Technique

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is always a hotspot research in the fields of radar, sonar, communication and so on. And uniform circular arrays (UCAs) are more attractive in the context of DOA estimation since their symmetrical structures have potential to provide two directions coverage. This paper proposed a new DOA estimation method for UCAs via virtual subarray beamforming technique. The method would provide an acceptable DOA estimate even if the number of sources is great than the number of array elements. Also, the performance of the proposed method would hold good when the snapshot length or the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is small. Simulations show that the proposed technique offers significantly improved estimation resolution, capacity, and accuracy relative to the existing techniques.