Velocity Estimation of Passive Target Based on Sparse Bayesian Learning Cross-Spectrum

Abstract

To solve the poor performance or even failure of the cross-spectrum (CS) method in hydroacoustic weak-target passive velocimetry, a sparse Bayesian learning cross-spectrum method (SBL-CS), combining phase compensation with sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the cross-correlation sound intensity is taken as the observation quantity and compensates for each frequency point of the cross-spectrum, which enables the alignment of cross-spectrum results at different frequencies. Then, the inter-correlation sound intensity of all frequencies is fused in the iterative estimation of the target velocity, verifying the proposed method’s ability to suppress the background noise when performing multi-frequency processing. The simulation results show that the proposed method is still effective in estimating the target velocity when the CS method fails and that the performance of the proposed method is better than the CS method with a decrease in SNR. As verified using the SWellEx-96 sea trial dataset, the RMSE of the proposed method for surface vessel speed measurement is 0.3545 m/s, which is 46.1% less than the traditional CS method, proving the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SBL-CS method for the estimation of the radial speed of a passive target.