High resolution time-delay estimation of underwater target geometric scattering

The geometric scatterings carry the information of the shape of an underwater target. While the time-delay of the weak geometric scattering exists in the received signal cannot be obtained accurately by the conventional time-delay estimation methods because of the limit of the main-lobe width and the interferences from the side-lobe. In this paper, we propose a high resolution time-delay estimation (HRTDE) scheme consisting of two steps. Firstly, when a linear-frequency-modulated (LFM) pulse is transmitted by sonar, the dechirping method transforms the geometric scatterings with different time-delays into multiple single-frequency components respectively, in which the frequency of the dechirped signal shows a linear relationship with the time-delay of the geometric scattering. Then the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is adopted to increase the spectrum resolution when multiple single-frequency signals exist in the dechirped signal and the frequency interval is smaller than the frequency resolution limit of the Fourier transform. Simulation results show that the main lobe of the proposed scheme is sharper and with less interference from the side-lobe, compared with the conventional time-delay estimation methods. The results from the anechoic pool experiment demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a better time-delay estimation performance for the weak geometric scattering generated by the bottom edge of the underwater target model than match filter based methods.