Determining the Characteristics and Mechanisms for Clutter and Environmental Reverberation and their Impact on Long Range Sonar Performance in Range-Dependent Fluctuating Ocean Waveguides

摘要

Determine the temporal and spatial characteristics, and physical mechanisms for clutter and environmental reverberation in instantaneous-wide- area underwater acoustic imaging and surveillance systems. This understanding is used to develop operational and signal processing techniques to distinguish clutter from scattered returns due to man-man targets, and to determine the limits placed by environmental reverberation on target detection. In the second area, the statistical properties of broadband acoustic signals transmitted and scattered in range-dependent ocean waveguides is examined. This knowledge is then used to determine the extent to which environmental variabilities limit our ability to perform target localization and parameter estimation through beamforming and matched-filtering broadband data from imaging systems in fluctuating and dispersive ocean waveguides.