Localization of Buried Spherical Shells Based on Wideband Signals

This study deals with detection and localization of buried objects. We developed a novel method, that extends the subspace method, to estimate the bearing and the range of buried objects with known shapes such as spheres or cylinders. The idea is to use the spatial complexities of the scattered field to form an acoustic model that we used instead of the plane wave model used in the subspace method. The received signals are wideband and correlated, thus we apply a frequential smoothing in order to decorrelate them. We applied this method first, on cylindrical shells and we obtained a satisfying result (Z. Saidi and S. Bourennane, 2005) and here we extend it to spherical shells. Performances of the proposed method are investigated on experimental data recorded during underwater acoustic experiments