Acoustic Bright Spot Monitoring for Target Tracking and Characterization
Abstract
We demonstrate the feasibility of using acoustic bright spots from a shielded receiver array to passively locate and characterize a nearby moving source (Acoustic Bright Spot Monitoring; ABSM). The idea of using acoustic bright spots is inspired by the ability of humans to locate and characterize sound sources. In humans, the existence of an acoustic bright spot caused by diffraction of sound waves around the head can cause us to mislocate sounds. In contrast, we have developed the foundations of a technique called Acoustic Bright Spot Monitoring (ABSM) where we use the evolution of a bright spot from a shadowed array of sensors to locate and estimate the size of a moving target. The proposed monitoring configuration is to have a sensor array surrounding a scattering (shielding) object such as a sphere. We show examples from the acoustic representation theorem demonstrating how the evolution of the acoustic bright spot and surrounding Fresnel shadow zone can be used to accomplish these objectives. In contrast to existing array techniques that only estimate the back azimuth to a target, monitoring the evolution of an acoustic bright spot can be used to locate and track a nearby object as well as estimate its size and/or range.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.S31D2270T
- Keywords:
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- 4259 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Ocean acoustics