Scenario Based Study of ETAM and FFTSA in Realistic Simulated Environment

PAssive Synthetic Aperture (PASA) is a technique of increasing the length of a small array artificially through array towing motion and signal processing. This will allow a user to acquire some advantage of long array while maintaining the maneuverability of a short array. The performances of two PASA beamforming algorithms, (i) Beam-Domain Extended Towed Array Measurement (BD-ETAM) and (ii) FFT Synthetic Aperture (FFTSA) are investigated using scenario based realistic simulated data. The performances are evaluated using output signal to noise ratio of beam power pattern, half power beam width and error in Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation. In addition, the resolution performance of PASA is also benchmarked against a well-known high-resolution technique. The effects of propagation in realistic tropical shallow water environment are considered in addition to moving source(s). The results show that FFTSA has good performance in all cases. A comparison study of the results reveals that FFTSA has better performance than ETAM in signal detection when the specific conditions are met while ETAM is better in other attributes. The outcome of the study suggests that while ETAM has very good overall performance, FFTSA could provide a complimentary support in enhancing detection capability.