Target Signal Simulation in Synthetic Underwater Environment for Performance Analysis of Monostatic Active Sonar

Abstract

Active sonar has been commonly used to detect targets existing in the shallow water. When a signal is transmitted and returned back from a target, it has been distorted by various properties of acoustic channel such as multipath arrivals, scattering from rough sea surface and ocean bottom, and refraction by sound speed structure, which makes target detection difficult. It is therefore necessary to consider these channel properties in the target signal simulation in operational performance system of active sonar. In this paper, a monostatic active sonar system is considered, and the target echo, reverberation, and ambient noise are individually simulated as a function of time, and finally summed to simulate a total received signal. A 3-dimensional highlight model, which can reflect the target features including the shape, position, and azimuthal and elevation angles, has been applied to each multipath pair between source and target to simulate the target echo signal. The results are finally compared to those obtained by the algorithm in which only direct path is considered in target signal simulation.