Underwater Tone Detection with Robust Coherently-Averaged Power Processor

Abstract

The detection of tonal signals with unknown frequencies is an important area of study in underwater signal processing. A common approach to address this issue is to use the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) for observations. When a tone does not lie precisely at the discrete DFT frequency point, its energy will leak to adjacent frequency point. This phenomenon is known as scalloping loss or Picket Fence Effect (PFE). PFE leads to the degradation of detection performance based on DFT. This paper studies the problem of robust detection in the case of PFE. A coherently-averaged power processor utilizing the information of adjacent frequency bins is designed. The results of simulations and experiments show that the proposed method is robust against PFE, and is highly suitable for tone detection in practical circumstances.