• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.225-233
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• 2024

Active sonar transmits sound waves to detect covertly maneuvering underwater objects and detects the signals reflected back from the target. However, in addition to the target's echo, the active sonar's received signal is mixed with seafloor, sea surface reverberation, biological noise, and other noise, making target recognition difficult. Conventional techniques for detecting signals above a threshold not only cause false detections or miss targets depending on the set threshold, but also have the problem of having to set an appropriate threshold for various underwater environments. To overcome this, research has been conducted on automatic calculation of threshold values through techniques such as Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) and application of advanced tracking filters and association techniques, but there are limitations in environments where a significant number of detections occur. As deep learning technology has recently developed, efforts have been made to apply it in the field of underwater target detection, but it is very difficult to acquire active sonar data for discriminator learning, so not only is the data rare, but there are only a very small number of targets and a relatively large number of non-targets. There are difficulties due to the imbalance of data. In this paper, the image of the energy distribution of the detection signal is used, and a classifier is learned in a way that takes into account the imbalance of the data to distinguish between targets and non-targets and added to the existing technique. Through the proposed technique, target misclassification was minimized and non-targets were eliminated, making target recognition easier for active sonar operators. And the effectiveness of the proposed technique was verified through sea experiment data obtained in the East Sea.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.173-181
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a moving target localization algorithm using acoustic spectrograms. A time-versus-frequency spectrogram provide a information of trajectory of the moving target in underwater. For a source at sufficiently long range from a receiver, broadband striation patterns seen in spectrogram represents the mutual interference between modes which reflected by surface and bottom. The slope of the maximum intensity striation is influenced by waveguide invariant parameter ${\beta}$ and distance between target and sensor. When more than two sensors are applied to measure the moving ship-radited noise, the slope and frequency of the maximum intensity striation are depend on distance between target and receiver. We assumed two sensors to fixed point then form a circle of apollonios which set of all points whose distances from two fixed points are in a constant ratio. In case of three sensors are applied, two circle form an intersection point so coordinates of this point can be estimated as a position of target. To evaluates a performance of the proposed localization algorithm, simulation is performed using acoustic propagation program.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.9-18
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• 2024

The importance of active sonar systems is emerging due to the quietness of underwater targets and the increase in ambient noise due to the increase in maritime traffic. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio of the echo signal due to multipath propagation of the signal, various clutter, ambient noise and reverberation makes it difficult to identify underwater targets using active sonar. Attempts have been made to apply data-based methods such as machine learning or deep learning to improve the performance of underwater target recognition systems, but it is difficult to collect enough data for training due to the nature of sonar datasets. Methods based on mathematical modeling have been mainly used to compensate for insufficient active sonar data. However, methodologies based on mathematical modeling have limitations in accurately simulating complex underwater phenomena. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a sonar signal synthesis method based on a deep neural network. In order to apply the neural network model to the field of sonar signal synthesis, the proposed method appropriately corrects the attention-based encoder and decoder to the sonar signal, which is the main module of the Tacotron model mainly used in the field of speech synthesis. It is possible to synthesize a signal more similar to the actual signal by training the proposed model using the dataset collected by arranging a simulated target in an actual marine environment. In order to verify the performance of the proposed method, Perceptual evaluation of audio quality test was conducted and within score difference -2.3 was shown compared to actual signal in a total of four different environments. These results prove that the active sonar signal generated by the proposed method approximates the actual signal.