THE MATCHED FIELD PROCESSING BENCHMARK PROBLEMS

In matched field processing sophisticated acoustic models are combined with signal processing techniques to localize an acoustic source in the ocean. A key challenge has been to develop schemes that work not just in idealized simulations but in realistic scenarios. Additionally it has been difficult to get a sense of the relative merits of different schemes: there has been no common set of problems to test the techniques. To assess the state of the art, a workshop was held in May 1993 at the Naval Research Laboratory where both simulated and experimental data were provided to the community of users to test the algorithms. However, researchers were not given the true source location and thus exercised their algorithms blindly. We describe here the test problems and provide an overview of the results and the lessons learned.