End-to-end underwater acoustic transmission loss prediction with adaptive multi-scale dilated network

Underwater acoustic propagation is a complex phenomenon in the ocean environment. Traditional methods for calculating acoustic propagation loss rely on solving complex partial differential equations. Deep learning methods, leveraging their robust nonlinear approximation capabilities, can model various physical phenomena effectively, significantly reducing computation time and cost. Despite considerable advancements in the study of various inverse underwater acoustic problems, research focused on forward physical modeling is still nascent. This study proposes an end-to-end architecture for predicting underwater acoustic transmission loss (TL). This architecture employs a data-driven approach capable of swiftly and accurately predicting the complete acoustic field. It employs a U-Net model integrated with an adaptive multi-scale dilated module, named MultiScale-DUNet, which effectively predicts by assimilating multi-scale acoustic field information. It is demonstrated that the MultiScale-DUNet is capable of predicting acoustic TL in complex two-dimensional ocean environments within the end-to-end framework. The results indicate that the MultiScale-DUNet can rapidly predict the acoustic TL while maintaining high accuracy under computationally inexpensive conditions. This end-to-end technology for predicting underwater acoustic TL holds broad application prospects in fields such as underwater exploration and real-time underwater monitoring.