Robust speed estimation for a moving harmonic acoustic source with a single stationary sensor.

A noise-insensitive cost function was developed for estimating the speed of harmonic acoustic sources in uniform linear motion. This function weighs and integrates the energy distribution of received tones in the time-frequency plane to enhance the robustness of parameter estimation under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, where weight values are intentionally combined with the law of observed instantaneous frequency. As the cost function is differentiable, the procedure of parameter estimations also has high computing efficiency. Processing data of SWellEx-96 experiments with real ocean noise confirmed the anti-noise capabilities of this cost function to conventional processing methods.