Self-initiating MUSIC-based direction finding in underwater acoustic particle velocity-field beamspace

This paper introduces a novel blind MUSIC-based (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) source localization algorithm applicable to an arbitrarily spaced three-dimensional array of vector hydrophones, each of which comprises two or more co-located and orthogonally oriented velocity hydrophones plus an optional pressure hydrophone. This proposed algorithm: (1) exploits the incident sources' angular diversity in the underwater acoustic particle velocity field; (2) adaptively forms velocity-field beams at each vector-hydrophone; (3) uses ESPRIT to self-generate coarse estimates of the sources' arrival angles to start off its MUSIC-based iterative search with no a priori source information; and (4) automatically pairs the x-axis direction-cosine estimates with the y-axis direction-cosine estimates. Simulation results verify the efficacy of this proposed scheme.