Detection and classification of short duration underwater acoustic signals by Prony´s method

Prony´s method is an ideal least squares time-series modeling technique for fitting a sum of exponentials to the data, especially when augmented with SVD noise reduction techniques. This method has been applied to acoustic signals gathered from underwater sonar sensors and the results reported. The authors present the performance of this modified Prony procedure as applied to short duration acoustic signals compared to a Wigner time-frequency transform method that also attempted to model the time-varying acoustic waveform