Combination of time reversal and synthetic aperture beamforming for active detection of small bottom objects in waveguide environments

To enhance detection of small targets, the combination of time reversal processing (TRP) and synthetic aperture beamforming (SABF) is investigated. With the spatial–temporal focusing, the potential application of TRP for active detection has been demonstrated [Kim S, Kuperman WA, Hodgkiss WS. Echo-to reverberation enhancement using a time reversal mirror. J Acoust Soc Am 2004;115(4):1525–31]. When a physical probe source (PS) replaced by a modeled source (MS), the “potential” is turned into being more practical. Similar to matched field processing, the robustness of TRP with MS needs to be considered. Meanwhile by the improvement of the extended towed array measurement (ETAM) algorithm of passive SABF, a segmented ETAM algorithm is discussed for its use in active sonar. With the echo-signal enhancement by time reversal transmission, the echo-to-reverberation ratio is further improved by SABF. Finally a matched filter is used to detect the target and the range of the target is estimated by the time delay referenced to the transmission time. The results of the waveguide tank experiment demonstrate that the TRP–SABF method can effectively detect and locate a bottom cylinder shell of 0.51 m long and 0.21 m in diameter.