Localization of buried objects through higher order statistics techniques

Underwater object localization is of great interest for a few years to acousticians (detection of boulders), marines (detection of buried mines), or archaeologists (detection of wreckage). Image and signal processing succeed in localizing objects lying on the sea bottom [J.A. Sunde, 1999], however localization of an object buried in sediment remains complex. The objective of this work is to propose a complete localization of objects buried in the sediment using high resolution techniques. A source which has many advantages (high relative bandwidth, narrow beam) and which are useful for object detection is used. This paper introduces a new algorithm for estimating the wide band parameters that is based on the high order statistics of the received signals with an aim of eliminating the Gaussian components from the signals received on the various hydrophones. In fact the noise of sea bottom is regarded as being Gaussian as well as the reverberations of the marine sediment. The performance of the proposed algorithm is studied on the real data recorded during underwater acoustic experiments.