Variability in the passive ranging of acoustic sources in air using a wavefront curvature technique.

Simultaneous time delay measurements from two adjacent pairs of sensors are used to estimate the "instantaneous" range and bearing of both stationary and moving broadband sources of continuous sound in air. The random fluctuations in the estimated source position are due to random errors in the time delay measurements. The variances of both the short time-scale and long time-scale random errors in the time delay estimates are quantified for different sensor separation distances and for different source positions. After normalization, the observed variances of the short time-scale random errors in the bearing and range estimates are found to agree with the theoretical results predicted for various sensor-source configurations where the independent variable is the length of the effective intersensor baseline. Increasing the intersensor separation distance by an order of magnitude reduces the bearing error variance by two orders of magnitude and the range error variance by four orders of magnitude.

[1]  S. Nardone,et al.  Estimation of location and motion parameters of a moving source observed from a linear array , 1981 .

[2]  A. Quazi.  An overview on the time delay estimate in active and passive systems for target localization , 1981 .

[3]  F. Dommermuth,et al.  Estimating the trajectory of an accelerationless aircraft by means of a stationary acoustic sensor , 1984 .

[4]  John L. Spiesberger.  Identifying cross‐correlation peaks due to multipaths with application to optimal passive localization of transient signals and tomographic mapping of the environment , 1996 .

[5]  Gilles A. Daigle,et al.  Line‐of‐sight propagation through atmospheric turbulence near the ground , 1983 .

[6]  Brian G. Ferguson,et al.  Passive wideband cross correlation with differential Doppler compensation using the continuous wavelet transform , 1999 .

[7]  Brian G. Ferguson,et al.  Time-delay estimation techniques applied to the acoustic detection of jet aircraft transits , 1999 .

[8]  Uno Ingard,et al.  A Review of the Influence of Meteorological Conditions on Sound Propagation , 1953 .

[9]  J. Hassab.  Passive bearing estimation of a broad-band source , 1984 .

[10]  G. Carter,et al.  The generalized correlation method for estimation of time delay , 1976 .

[11]  D. Wilson,et al.  Performance bounds for acoustic direction-of-arrival arrays operating in atmospheric turbulence , 1998 .

[12]  R. Zeskind,et al.  Inherent bias in wavefront curvature ranging , 1981 .

[13]  Tony F. W. Embleton,et al.  Tutorial on sound propagation outdoors , 1996 .

[14]  G. Carter.  Time delay estimation for passive sonar signal processing , 1981 .

[15]  John L. Spiesberger.  Linking auto- and cross-correlation functions with correlation equations: Application to estimating the relative travel times and amplitudes of multipath , 1998 .