High-speed sensing for object detection in underwater bi-static acoustic paths

Detection of objects in underwater environment is an important operation that can be aimed to assess the pollution in the region under study as well as to prevent intrusion of undesired objects in off shore power production facilities or in the restricted entrance area. The use of acoustic methods has been proven to be very powerful for the detection and localization of the underwater objects. This paper proposes a new method for the detection of an underwater object using bi-static acoustic paths. The method uses the dynamic evolution the phase space of the received signals, namely the phase space trajectory, without any synchronization and it computes the point wise Euclidean norm. The detection map obtained gives both the amplitude and time of arrival information. The major advantage brought by this approach (rather than conventional techniques) is that the signals need no synchronization, their characterization being based only on their wave form.