Performance of an Acoustic Doppler Velocity Estimation Method Based on the Mixed Scattering Model

The acquisition of vessel´s speed by using acoustic Doppler velocity log (DVL) is a well-known method. It depends on the estimation of Doppler-shift between the DVL and the seabed. Due to scattering from many different scatterers, a Doppler signal is received with a large variance. The Pulse-pair method estimates the first moment of the Doppler-shift and the result is a robust and accurate estimation method with a very low bias. In order to verify this performance, a mixed scattering model is proposed, where effects from different scatters can be taken into account. This mixed scattering model is then used for synthesizing data with known parameters. These synthesized data makes it possible to quantify the accuracy and performance of estimation based on the pulse-pair method.