Geoacoustic parameter inversion from ship radiated noise using the structure similarity of dispersion curves

In this paper, the dispersion curves of ship radiated noise are exploited to estimate geoacoustic parameters in shallow water. For the purpose of avoiding path disturbance, the dispersion curves are transformed from range-frequency into wavenumber-frequency. A structural similarity (SSIM) based method is therefore proposed to measure the similarity between the replica and measured dispersion curves as a cost function. Bottom compressional sound speed, density and attenuation are estimated in the Pekeris waveguide simulation environment. Compared with the traditional method, SSIM method has better estimation accuracy when water depth gets deeper and SNR is high enough.