Efficient underwater two-dimensional coherent source localization with linear vector-hydrophone array

This paper proposes a new computationally simple 2D direction finding algorithm for underwater acoustic coherent signals using a uniformly linear array of vector hydrophones. We decorrelate the source coherency by subarray averaging, and apply the propagator method to estimate automatically paired direction cosines embedded in the acoustical particle-velocity components of the vector hydrophone. Therefore, the presented algorithm requires neither the eigen-decomposition into signal/noise subspaces nor the 2D iteratively searching. In addition, because the vector-hydrophone array manifold contains no sensor location information, this new algorithm can offer high azimuth–elevation estimation accuracy by setting vector hydrophones to space much farther apart than a half-wavelength. The presented algorithm can be regarded as an improvement of SUMWE algorithm [19] via replacing the pressure hydrophones there by vector hydrophones. Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.