A DOA Estimation algorithm for the vertical line array of vector hydrophone based on data fusion method

According to the array signal processing theory, the horizontal directivity index of the vector hydrophone vertical array (VHVA) is not higher than that of a single vector hydrophone. In order to improve the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation performance, a data fusion method for the VHVA is proposed in this paper. The azimuth estimation results corresponding to each vector hydrophone at a series of single-frequency points are obtained through the cross-spectral processing algorithm. Then the narrow-band estimation results of multiple hydrophones are processed by data fusion method to achieve more accurate estimation results. By adopting the histogram statistics method, the synthetic high-resolution estimation result is obtained finally. To verify the significantly improved performance of the proposed algorithm, we conducted the simulation and sea trial. It is revealed that the DOA estimation performance of the VHVA is much better than that of a single vector hydrophone. In the fusion estimation result, the peak of the statistics values is much narrower, and the side lobe is obviously suppressed.