Acoustic source localization in ocean waveguide based on compressive beamforming

Due to the complexity of underwater sound propagation, acoustic source localization in an ocean waveguide has become a particularly challenging task. In this paper, a new high-resolution approach for underwater acoustic source localization is developed, which can be formulated as a sparse representation problem and further converted into a convex optimization problem with sparsity constraints. Different from other conventional Matched-Field Processing (MFP) techniques, our proposed approach makes use of the inherent sparse structure of the spatial localization problem and applies the compressive beamforming technique to the source localization in order to achieve high-resolution ability. Computer simulation indicates the superior source-location resolution of our proposed approach as compared with the conventional MFP technique.