Bayesian Inversion for Geoacoustic Parameters in Shallow Sea

Geoacoustic parameter inversion is a crucial issue in underwater acoustic research for shallow sea environments and has increasingly become popular in the recent past. This paper investigates the geoacoustic parameters in a shallow sea environment using a single-receiver geoacoustic inversion method based on Bayesian theory. In this context, the seabed is regarded as an elastic medium, the acoustic pressure at different positions under low-frequency is chosen as the study object, and the theoretical prediction value of the acoustic pressure is described by the Fast Field Method (FFM). The cost function between the measured and modeled acoustic fields is established under the assumption of Gaussian data errors using Bayesian methodology. The Bayesian inversion method enables the inference of the seabed geoacoustic parameters from the experimental data, including the optimal estimates of these parameters, such as density, sound speed and sound speed attenuation, and quantitative uncertainty estimates. The optimization is carried out by simulated annealing (SA), and the Posterior Probability Density (PPD) is given as the inversion result based on the Gibbs Sampler (GS) algorithm. Inversion results of the experimental data are in good agreement with both measured values and estimates from Genetic Algorithm (GA) inversion result in the same environment. Furthermore, the results also indicate that the sound speed and density in the seabed have fewer uncertainties and are more sensitive to acoustic pressure than the sound speed attenuation. The sea noise could increase the variance of PPD, which has less influence on the sensitive parameters. The mean value of PPD could still reflect the true values of geoacoustic parameters in simulation.