Suppressing reverberation by multipath separation for improved buried object detection

This paper addresses the problem of using a vertical aperture to suppress the interference caused to SAS by surface bounce path reverberation components decorrelated by the rough sea surface. Using at-sea gathered SACLANTCEN vertical array acoustic data, we characterize the reverberation vertical properties and investigate the separation of the direct and surface bounce path reverberation and target echo components. We propose two implementations of the PCI method of interference cancellation and demonstrate with actual data that they are effective in separating the reverberation in the vertical domain.