Direction of arrival tracking of an underwater acoustic source using particle filtering: Real data experiments

In the past, both theoretical work and practical implementation of particle filtering (PF) method have been extensively studied. However, its application in underwater signal processing has received much less attention. This paper intends to introduce PF approach for underwater acoustic signal processing. Particularly, we are interested in direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using PF. A detailed introduction along with this perspective is presented in this paper. Since the noise usually spreads the mainlobe of likelihood function and causes problem in subsequent particle resampling step, an exponential weighted likelihood model is developed to emphasize particles at more relevant area. Hence, the the effect due to background noise can be reduced. Real underwater acoustic data collected in SWELLEx-96 experiment are employed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed PF approaches for underwater DOA tracking.