Beam-time delay domain deconvolved scheme for high-resolution active localization of underwater targets

Matched filter (MF) and conventional beamforming (CBF) are widely used in active sonar; the performance of the former (temporal resolution) is limited by the signal bandwidth, and that of the latter (angular resolution) is limited by the array aperture. Previous work has shown that angular resolution can be significantly improved by deconvolving the CBF outputs. In this paper, deconvolution is extended to the time domain by deconvolving the MF outputs, and a high-resolution two-dimensional deconvolution method is proposed to simultaneously improve the temporal and angular resolution. Numerical simulations and experimental tank data show that angular resolutions are improved 26 times, and temporal resolutions are improved 10 times compared with the conventional MF and CBF methods. Reverberations are much suppressed to allow target echoes to be detected from the received time series data.