Multiuser sonar watermarking and detection in an underwater acoustic channel

Sonar watermarking is the practice of embedding low-power, secure digital signatures in the time frequency space of a waveform. The algorithm is designed for a single source/receiver configuration. However, in a multiuser environment, multiple sources broadcast sonar waveforms that overlap in both time and frequency. The receiver can be configured as a filter bank where each bank is dedicated to detecting a specific watermark. However, a filter bank is prone to mutual interference as multiple sonar waveforms are simultaneously present at the detector input. To mitigate mutual interference, a multiuser watermark detector is formulated as a decorrelating detector that decouples detection amongst the watermark signatures. The acoustic channel is simulated in software and modeled by an FIR filter. This model is used to compensate for the degradation of spreading sequences used for watermark embedding. The test statistic generated at the output of the decorrelating detector is used in a joint maximum likelihood ratio detector to establish the presence or absence of the watermark in each sonar waveform. ROC curves are produced for multiple sources positioned at varying ranges subject to ambient ocean noise controlled by varying sea states.

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