Denoising Underwater Acoustic Signals for Applications in Acoustical Oceanography

Abstract

A method for denoising underwater acoustic signals used in applications of acoustical oceanography is presented. The method has been introduced for imaging denoising and has been modified to be applied with acoustic signals. The method keeps the energy significant part of the raw signal and reduces the effects of noise by comparing overlapping signal windows and keeping components which resemble true signal energy. It is shown by means of characteristic experiments in connection with a statistical signal characterization scheme based on wavelet transform, that using the statistical features of the wavelet sub-band coefficients of the denoised signal, tomography or geoacoustic inversions lead to a reliable estimation of the parameters of a marine environment.