Robust underwater direction-of-arrival tracking based on variational Bayesian extended Kalman filter

The variational Bayesian extended Kalman filter (VB-EKF) based robust direction-of-arrival (DOA) tracking technique is proposed to make reliable estimations of the bearing angle of an underwater target with uncertain environment noise. By utilizing the VB-EKF scheme, the uncertain measurement noise caused by an unknown underwater environment along with the bearing angle of the target can be estimated simultaneously to provide reliable results at every tracking step. The proposed technique is demonstrated and verified by the sea trial data from the South China Sea in July 2021 and both the robustness and accuracy are proved superior to the traditional DOA estimating methods.