Study on the long-distance target apperception techniques for underwater vehicles

The limited physical size for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) makes it difficult to acquire enough space gain for localizing long-distance targets. A new technique about long-distance target apperception with passive synthetic aperture array for underwater vehicles is presented. First, a synthetic aperture-processing algorithm based on the FFT transform in the beam space (BSSAP) is introduced. Then, the study on the flank array passive long-distance apperception techniques in the frequency scope of 11–18 kHz is implemented from the view of improving array gains, detection probability and augmenting detected range under a certain sea environment. The results show that the BSSAP algorithm can extend the aperture effectively and improve detection probability. Because of the augment of the transmission loss, the detected range has the trend of decline with the increase of frequency under the same target source level. The synthesized array could improve the space gain by nearly 7 dB and SNR is increased by about 5 dB. The detected range is enhanced to nearly 2 km under the condition of 108–118 dB of the target source level for AUV system in measurement interval of nearly 1 s.