Performance Evaluation for Underwater DOA Estimation based on Binary Measurements

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is a core task for the sonar systems. Recently, an urgent need for estimating DOA from low precision measurements arises. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of DOA estimation based on the binary (1-bit) measurements in the underwater scenarios. Specifically, the synthetic data are generated from the underwater acoustic field model for the horizontal and vertical arrays, and then the data are quantized to be binary. The DOAs are estimated by the 1-bit conventional beamforming method and the 1-bit Compressive Sensing method. Compared with the un-quantized data, the simulation results show that in the specific situations the DOA can be well-estimated with binary measurements, and the performance is comparable with the unquantized case. Some experiences are summarized based on the simulational experiments, which can be useful in real applications.