A comparative study on the performances of the DF techniques using a single acoustic vector sensor

Underwater acoustic vector sensors (AVS) are devices which can measure scalar pressure and three dimensional acceleration or particle velocity with only one sensor. Direction of an acoustic target can be estimated by these four measured scalar values. Techniques based on either closed-form expressions or beamforming can be carried out for direction finding by using the axial projections of the gradient vector of the pressure from the target. In this work, the performances of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation techniques for a single underwater AVS are analyzed in detail under the effects of various error sources such as imperfect projections and ambient noise.