ALMA 2015: Sea Trial of an Underwater Target Localization Technique Using Hausdorff Distance

The fundamental and practical problem of passive localization in range and depth, of an acoustic underwater source is addressed, with application to an at-sea experiment. We propose and try a new matching method based on a metric called as Hausdorff distance as a cost-function to be minimized, in order to perform the localization inversion. The data set analyzed here was collected during the DGA campaign ALMA 2015, which took place in a shallow water environment of the southern coast of France. Acoustic data were measured over a 10m-high vertical linear array (VLA), composed of 64 hydrophones. The 2-D localization, in range and depth, is performed by matching the patterns of time difference of arrival (TDOA), between respectively observed and modeled sequences. Several variants of the Hausdorff Distance are applied, firstly separately in each single hydrophone, and then combined in order to improve the localization accuracy, reducing the ambiguity either is depth and in range. The performance is evaluated in terms of the localization accuracy of the proposed method, in a context of passive localization with a cooperative system considering a motionless target. Very satisfactory performance and accuracy are obtained.