Prefiltered Striation-Based Beamforming for Range Estimation of Multiple Sources

The element–frequency acoustic intensity of a horizontal line array with a sufficient aperture exhibits interference striation patterns, which can be used for source range estimation without prior environmental information. Under multisource scenarios, the interference striations of the sources overlap with each other, leading to great difficulty in utilizing the information of striations. In this paper, the wavenumber filtering method is applied to each sensor of the horizontal line array to extract the surface-reflected–bottom-reflected modes and reconstruct the recognizable interference spectrogram for each source. Then, via beamforming along the striations, the source ranges can be estimated individually with little prior environmental information and without the long-time observation of moving sources. The required sensor spacing is analyzed, and the spatial filtering capabilities for a single source from different bearings and two sources for which azimuth angles are close to each other have also been investigated. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can estimate ranges of multiple sources within 25 km, with relative errors of less than 4%.