A New Low-Cost Acoustic Beamforming Architecture for Real-Time Marine Sensing: Evaluation and Design

Abstract

This paper mainly studies the performance of an acoustic beamforming technique applied to a low-cost hydrophone in a linear array of two to four elements for the detection and localization of underwater acoustic sound waves. It also evaluates the integration of the array in an energy-efficient real-time monitoring system architecture, allowing marine sensing to be conducted without human intervention. Such architecture would consist of vertical linear arrays of two or four RHSA-10 hydrophones models attached to a buoy or a vessel for sound detection; a frequency domain beamformer (FDB) technique implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) for sound source localization; a LoRa wireless sensor network mote to provide convenient access from a base center. The architecture aims to alleviate sea traffic control for countries that lack the financial resources to properly address illegal fishing or piracy issues, mostly committed in small fast motorized boats. In our experiment, the sound waves emitted by a small motorized boat were successfully detected and tracked by three data acquisitions at a 1 km range. It is demonstrated that a system using a small number of hydrophones is capable of producing robust accuracy over a large band frequency in the presence of noise interference.