The use of a multilayer perceptron for adaptive correlation processing in a acoustically complex environment

Robust detection and classification for active sonar processing in acoustically complex environments is a difficult and challenging problem. Complex bathymetry and propagation effects may cause multipath spreading of the transmitted signal before it arrives back at the receiver. Correlating with a replica of the transmitted signal may thus severely degrade the performance of a system. The paper explores the use of a multilayer perceptron to compensate for channel and other medium effects in a acoustically complex environment. It is shown that adaptation to the environment in such scenarios can lead to significant processing gain and that a multilayer perceptron is capable of implementing this type of processing