The Striation-Correlation-Based Beamforming for Estimating the Green’s Function in a Shallow Water Waveguide

In shallow water, there exist regular interference striations on the structured sound intensity pattern versus frequency and element location of a horizontal array. Beamforming along the striation with frequency-shifted pressure can improve the correlation among array signals, but the beam focusing performance is limited by the source spectrum (e.g. random phase spectrum generated from ship-radiated noise) and signal truncation. In this paper, the cross-correlation phase relationship among the array signals is deduced, and striation-based beamforming with such cross-correlated data can produce a similar directivity to the conventional beamforming, while the effect from signal truncation and source spectrum can be eliminated. This striation-correlation-based beamforming also outputs the signal corresponding to the Green’s function between the source and the reference array element, moreover, recovers the interference structure that characters the channel. The striation-based array signal processing also provides the proposed Greens function estimation method with the ability to work effectively under the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio. Simulation results are presented and performance variations related to signal frequency, signal-to-noise ratio, striation slope estimation error, element number and array aperture are also analyzed numerically.