Investigation Of The Method Of Towed Array Shape Estimation

As towed hydrophone array techniques have achieved a development that has longer and multi-line arrays, shape estimation in real time has been a key to raise the detective performance and resolution of the towed array.Firstly, various methods of array shape estimation have been discussed and classified. As it is not easy to locate the acoustic source, this paper provides an eigenvector method based heading sensors, which combines the acoustic method and non-acoustic method. This method can estimate the towed array shape using source in unknown location. Then, this paper compares the performance of the eigenvector method based on heading sensors in narrowband source and wideband source. And next, some methods to reduce the error have been discussed, which caused by SNR, sensitivity of heading sensor and bad channel. At last, numerical experiment shows that the eigenvector method based on heading sensors is in efficiency, and test with data from lake trials proves that this method is valuable to real shape estimation.