Source localization in shallow water in the presence of sensor depth uncertainty

This paper studies passive source localization performance in shallow water using a vertical array whose sensor depths are unknown. The performance degradation with respect to the case of known sensor depths is studied via the Cramer-Rao Bound for a single far field narrow band source. Examination of the bound indicates that there is no inherent singularity in the Fisher Information Matrix due to uncertainty in the sensor depths (as opposed to the case of localization in free space). Numerical examples show that the performance degradation in source localization due to the need to estimate the sensor depths in a typical scenario is approximately 3–5dB.