Non-cooperative underwater acoustic communication signal detection method based on sliding cepstrum

An underwater acoustic channel is a complicated and variable channel with noise. It is challenging to detect non-cooperative underwater acoustic communication signal under the condition of unknown signal parameters and low SNR. Now, cepstrum has been widely used in communication signal detection. However, it still cannot meet the requirement of non-cooperative underwater acoustic communication signal detection under the condition of low SNR. We propose a piecewise sliding cepstrum method based on the traditional cepstrum theory to improve detection performance further. We analyze the distribution characteristics of piecewise sliding cepstrum of noise data. Then we present Neyman-Pearson criterion-based piecewise sliding cepstrum detector for non-cooperative underwater acoustic communication signal detection. The value of piecewise sliding cepstrum is demonstrated by simulation and applied to actual recorded data. The results show that the piecewise sliding cepstrum method outperforms cepstrum considerably.