Non-Rayleigh Reverberation Studies

摘要

The primary focus of the research was on developing a statistical model for non-Rayleigh reverberation that allowed for analysis of the reverberation statistics, and therefore the sonar system probability of false alarm, as a function of sonar system and environmental parameters. Non-Rayleigh reverberation is a statistical representation of clutter in active sonar systems. False alarms arising from clutter are recognized as the primary hindrance to automating the detection-classific ation-localization (DCL) sonar signal processing chain for low- and mid-frequency systems operating in shallow water environments. The most significant accomplishment was a novel derivation of the well known K distribution using a finite number of scatterers as opposed to the traditionally assumed infinite (negative binomial distributed) number. This derivation allowed linking the shape parameter of the K distribution to sonar parameters such as transmit waveform bandwidth and array beamwidth as well as environmental parameters such as scatterer density and multipath propagation.