Locating Ships Using Time Reversal and Matrix Pencil Method by Their Underwater Acoustic Signals

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Jul 26;21(15):5065. doi: 10.3390/s21155065.

Abstract

This paper presents a technique, based on the matrix pencil method (MPM), for the compression of underwater acoustic signals produced by boat engines. The compressed signal, represented by its complex resonance expansion, is intended to be sent over a low-bit-rate wireless communication channel. We demonstrate that the method can provide data compression greater than 60%, ensuring a correlation greater than 93% between the reconstructed and the original signal, at a sampling frequency of 2.2 kHz. Once the signal was reconstituted, a localization process was carried out with the time reversal method (TR) using information from four different sensors in a simulation environment. This process sought to achieve the identification of the position of the ship using only passive sensors, considering two different sensor arrangements.

Keywords: backpropagation; complex natural resonances; data compression; location of boats; matrix pencil method; poles; reconstruction; time reversal.