Tracking of conventional beamforming with hydrophone array of varying geometry

In conventional beamformers of a large towed hydrophone array of fixed linear array geometry the sensors may be displaced from their nominal positions due to various kinds of force on the array. The displacements are usually time varying and can severely degrade the performance of the beamformer. This problem is approached by restoring the sensor output signals before beamforming by adaptively tracking and compensating for the displacements. This approach does not require modifications of the conventional shipboard beamformer and hence can be used cost-effectively to upgrade existing conventional systems. Two adaptive algorithms are used for two different cases: known sensor moving trajectories and unknown trajectories with relatively small displacements compared with the intersensor spacing. Tracking performance of the algorithms is analyzed. Simulation results show that for known sensor trajectories the algorithm significantly improves the performance of the conventional shipboard beamformer whereas only limited improvement can be achieved when the trajectories are unknown