Development of New Methods for Position Estimation of Underground Acoustic Source Using a Passive SONAR System

The aim of the work described in this paper is to develop a complex underground acoustic system which detects and localizes the origin of an underground hammering sound using an array of hydrophones located about 100m underground. Three different methods for the sound localization will be presented, a time-delay method, a power-attenuation method and a hybrid method. In the time-delay method, the cross correlation of the signals received from the array of sensors is used to calculate the time delays between those signals. In the power-attenuation method, the powers of the received signals provide a measure of the distances of the source from the sensors. In the hybrid method, both informations of time-delays and power-ratios are coupled together to produce better performance of position estimation. A new acoustic imaging technique has been developed for improving the hybrid method. This new acoustic imaging method shows the multi-dimensional distribution of the normalized cost function, so as to indicate the trend of the minimizing direction toward the source location. For each method the sound localization is carried out in three dimensions underground. The distance between the true and estimated origins of the source is 28m for a search area of radius 250m.