Underwater acoustic signal detection using virtual time reversal processing

A better underwater acoustic signal detection algorithm for hydrophone array is studied under the condition that the form of the target radiated signal is unknown and no extra acoustic transducer is available.The performance of the conventional energy detection algorithm is analyzed using the same method solving the classical binary detection problem.Then,according to virtual time reversal processing theory,novel signal detector is proposed based on the test statistics formed by the processed hydrophone array receiving signals.And the theoretical formulas of detection threshold and detection performance,as well as the Signal-to-Noise ratio(SNR) gain to conventional energy detection algorithm,are deduced for this proposed virtual time reversal signal detection algorithm.Computer simulations are carried out to analyze the capability of these two algorithms from four aspects,the frequency of the source,the number of hydrophone elements,the target distance and the target depth.Resultsshow that the proposed algorithm has remarkable advantage on detection performance over the conventional energy detection algorithm and the number of hydrophone elements is the most important factor which has a great impact on the performance of the proposed algorithm.