Gridless SPICE applied to parameter estimation of underwater acoustic Frequency Hopping signals

The Frequency Hopping (FH) communication technique is one of classical methods of spread spectrum communication techniques, and it is widely used in terrestrial and underwater communications due to its robustness to jamming, low probability of interception and facility in communication networking. In particular, estimating and tracking the parameters of FH signals are important tasks in underwater acoustic warfare. This paper applies gridless SPICE (GLS) to the parameter estimation of underwater acoustic FH signals, mainly focused on time-frequency pattern and hop timing. As compared to the conventional spectrogram method, the time-frequency analysis method based on gridless SPICE has better frequency acquisition for the same samples. As compared to the SLR method proposed by Daniele Angelosante, this method has better performance for estimating parameters when we do not know the hopping frequency set.