A method of ship-radiated noise measurement based on matched field processing in an inhomogeneous ambient noise environment

A method of ship-radiated noise measurement via vertical linear array (VLA) is proposed to decrease the measurement error caused by the propagation of the radiated noise in the complex underwater acoustic channel and inhomogeneous ambient noise. The model of the inhomogeneous ambient noise field generated by the surface noise sources is established, and the theoretical model of the ship-radiated noise measurement in the inhomogeneous ambient noise is derived according to the transmission theory of the underwater acoustic channel. Numerical simulations in typical shallow water environment demonstrate the measurement performance of the proposed method, and the advantage has been verified by comparing to the conventional matched field processing (C-MFP) measurement method. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can measure the radiated noise source level in the inhomogeneous ambient noise accurately. the measurement error is less than 1 dB, and better performance than the C-MFP.