Near-field/far-field azimuth and elevation angle estimation using a single vector hydrophone

This paper introduces a new underwater acoustic eigenstructure ESPRIT-based algorithm that yields closed-form direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates using a single vector hydrophone. A vector hydrophone is composed of two or three spatially co-located but orthogonally oriented velocity hydrophones plus another optional co-located pressure hydrophone. This direction finding algorithm may (under most circumstances) resolve up to four uncorrelated monochromatic sources impinging from the near-field or the far-field, but it assumes that all signal frequencies are distinct. It requires no a priori knowledge of the signals' frequencies, suffers no frequency-DOA ambiguity, and pairs automatically the x-axis direction cosines with the y-axis direction cosines. It significantly outperforms an array of spatially displaced pressure hydrophones of comparable array-manifold size and computational load but may involve more complex hardware. This work also derives new Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) for various vector hydrophone constructions of arrival angle estimates for the incident uncorrelated sinusoidal signals corrupted by spatio-temporally correlated additive noise.