Shallow Water Acoustic Signal Multi-path Delay Estimation

The problem of time delay estimation (TDE) with multipath transmissions arises often in many sonar systems. Time delay estimation was widely used in many areas such as target localization, directions of arrival (DOA) estimation.In this thesis, we systematically discuss the time delay estimation methods which are widely used in underwater signal processing. For the application of underwater acoustic systems, we present two algorithms in detail: MUSIC algorithm based on the eigenvalue decomposition and least square method.At first, we present an introduction of the TDE and give a general idea of the research. Then we describe the pre-processing method for the signal processing and preliminarily describe the acoustic field of shallow sea. In the following two chapters, we analyze the two algorithms one by one. For the different algorithms, we carry on different computer simulation experiments and analyze the TDE results for different SNR.Through the work of this thesis, we systematically analyze some existing algorithms and make these TDE algorithms suitable for application. It also makes these algorithms easy to be used in the underwater acoustic system.