Underwater Acoustic Time Delay Estimation Based on Envelope Differences of Correlation Functions

Guodong Li; Jinsong Wu; Taolin Tang; Zhixin Chen; Jun Chen; Huang Liu

doi:10.3390/s19051259

Underwater Acoustic Time Delay Estimation Based on Envelope Differences of Correlation Functions

Sensors (Basel). 2019 Mar 12;19(5):1259. doi: 10.3390/s19051259.

Authors

Guodong Li^{1

2}, Jinsong Wu³, Taolin Tang^{4

5}, Zhixin Chen^{6

7}, Jun Chen^{8

9}, Huang Liu^{10

11}

Affiliations

¹ Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China. liguodong@fmiri.ac.cn.
² Joint Laboratory for Deep Blue Fishery Engineering, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, China. liguodong@fmiri.ac.cn.
³ Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, 8370451 Santiago, Chile. wujs@ieee.org.
⁴ Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China. tangtaolin@fmiri.ac.cn.
⁵ Joint Laboratory for Deep Blue Fishery Engineering, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, China. tangtaolin@fmiri.ac.cn.
⁶ Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China. chenzhixin@fmiri.ac.cn.
⁷ Joint Laboratory for Deep Blue Fishery Engineering, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, China. chenzhixin@fmiri.ac.cn.
⁸ Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China. chenjun@fmiri.ac.cn.
⁹ Joint Laboratory for Deep Blue Fishery Engineering, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, China. chenjun@fmiri.ac.cn.
¹⁰ Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China. liuhuang@fmiri.ac.cn.
¹¹ Joint Laboratory for Deep Blue Fishery Engineering, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, China. liuhuang@fmiri.ac.cn.

Abstract

This paper proposes underwater acoustic time delay estimation based on the envelope differences of correlation functions (EDCF), which mitigates the delay estimation errors introduced by the amplitude fluctuations of the correlation function envelopes in the traditional correlation methods (CM). The performance of the proposed delay estimation method under different time values was analyzed, and the optimal difference time values are given. To overcome the influences of digital signal sampling intervals on time delay estimation, a digital time delay estimation approach with low complexity and high accuracy is proposed. The performance of the proposed time delay estimation was analyzed in underwater multipath channels. Finally, the accuracy of the delay estimation using this proposed method was demonstrated by experiments.

Keywords: correlation method; envelope differences of correlation functions; time delay estimation; underwater acoustic localization.