Split Beam Cross Correlation for A Hybrid Acoustic Vector Sensor Array

A hybrid acoustic vector sensor array (AVSA) is consisted mainly of pressure hydrophones and a few vector sensors within. It aims at acquiring good left-right ambiguity elimination performance, while avoiding the disadvantages and complexity of full-rank AVSA which is completely made up with vector sensors. This paper proposes a split beam cross-correlation (SBC) method for the hybrid AVSA, which cross-correlates the beam outputs of the pressure-only subarray and vector sensor subarray in the hybrid AVSA to get the unambiguous direction and energy information of targets with only one vector sensor or a few. Simulation results validate the performance of the SBC method and show that the proposed method for hybrid AVSA can completely suppress the false target and eliminate the ambiguity for broadband targets at a comparatively low cost.