Localization by maximizing long-time integrated spectral power [sonar]

A novel method of target motion analysis (TMA) is presented. In contrast to conventional TMA techniques, which use sequences of bearing and/or frequency estimates as their inputs, the new TMA method works directly with hydrophone data to estimate the target track. For a given straight-line target track, the spectral level at the output of a plane-wave beamformer is computed at the frequency and angle coordinates which would be observed at each integration time. A quadratically convergent Newton´s method is then used to find the target track parameters that maximize the sum of the spectral values over the entire observation window