A Passive DOA Estimation Algorithm of Underwater Multipath Signals via Spatial Time-Frequency Distributions

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of underwater multipath signals has become an indispensable part of many military and civil applications in the oceanic field. However, DOAs of different paths of the multipath signals may be the same or too close to be separated in space, which brings a great challenge to the DOA estimation of multipath signals. Besides, the number of multipath is generally unknown and time-varying in passive scenarios which generally lead to an underdetermined case. Therefore, it is essential to study an efficient algorithm to realize the underdetermined DOA estimation of underwater multipath signals in passive scenarios. This paper proposes a passive DOA estimation algorithm of underwater multipath signals via spatial time-frequency distributions (STFDs). Firstly, we establish a multipath signals model and utilize the quadratic time-frequency (TF) analysis method to reduce cross-terms while keeping a good resolution. Then, we estimate the number of multipath and introduce a novel multi-ridge detection technique to extract the TF trajectories of multipath signals, which adopts the idea of smoothing forward and backward, and the edge TF point detection strategy. Lastly, we estimate the DOA of each path of the multipath signals separately and realize source association based on the clustering-based method. Simulation results and analysis demonstrate that this algorithm can effectively improve the estimation accuracy of instantaneous frequency (IF) and DOA estimation of underwater multipath signals in underdetermined cases and passive situations.