Unsupervised classification of hydrophone signals with an improved mel-frequency cepstral coefficient based on measured data analysis

Recently, passive detection technology has developed the ability to detect surface ships based on the noise emissions recorded by hydrophones, making it possible in some cases to classify surface ships. One of the most concerning issues with ships and underwater targets is the current lack of reliable features for unsupervised classification. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (IMFCC) feature for unsupervised clustering of marine targets. As the feature extraction of hydrophone signals rely on preprocessing, the IMFCC adds cyclic modulation spectrum (CMS) and cross-correlation bispectrum (CCB) in the preprocessing module before traditional the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient process, and the principal component analysis (PCA) is added as the backend processing module. There are four contributions as follows: First, for IMFCC extraction, it combines the advantages of the CMS, CCB, MFCC, and PCA. Second, the two common unsupervised clusters, Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and fuzzy C-means are used to evaluate the CMS, CCB, and several MFCCs-MFCC-vector quantization (MFCC-VQ), MFCC-Gaussian mixture model (MFCC-GMM), TEO-MFCC (Teager Energy Operator based MFCC), and IMFCC. Third, the performances of traditional MFCC, Teager-energy operator (TEO)-MFCC, IMFCC, MFCC-VQ, and MFCC-GMM are discussed under different dimensions, signal-to-noise ratios, distances, and depths. Finally, the experimental results prove that the IMFCC method has a strong anti-interference ability and is robust and has a high-success rate for clustering multitarget or different depth targets, which enables the IMFCC to be a reliable feature for unsupervised classification.