Own-ship noise cancelling method for towed line array sonars using a beam-formed reference signal

Abstract

: This paper proposes a noise cancelling algorithm to remove own-ship noise for a towed array sonar. Extra beamforming is performed using partial channels of the acoustic array to get a reference beam signal robust to the noise bearing. Frequency domain Adaptive Noise Cancelling (ANC) is applied based on Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS) algorithm using the reference beam. The bearing of own-ship noise is estimated from the coherence between the reference beam and input beam signals. Own-ship noise level is calculated using a beampattern of the noise with estimated steering angle, which prevents loss of a target signal by determining whether to update a filter so that removed signal level does not exceed the estimated noise level. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm maintains its performance when the own-ship gets out off its bearing 40 % more than the conventional algorithm’s limit and detects the target even when the frequency of the target signal is same with the frequency of the own-ship signal.