Ultrasonic signal delay determination for distance estimation in underwater space

Reverberation and multipath propagation afîect the accuracy of time of flight (TOF) estimation in confined underwater medium. In this paper, time delay has been estimated by obtaining the transmitted signal and first echo signal from measured signal acquised by using a wideband transducer with 5 MHz central frequency. Cross-correlation (CC) and generalized cross-correlation (GCC) methods have been applied to the obtained signals and their performances have been compared. The results show that GCC method has better performance for time delay estimation in confined underwater medium where multipath propagation and reverberation are severe.