Robust underwater direction-of-arrival tracking with uncertain environmental disturbances using a uniform circular hydrophone array

Underwater direction-of-arrival (DOA) tracking using a hydrophone array is an important research subject in passive sonar signal processing. In this study, considering that an unknown underwater environment results in uncertain disturbances to the measurements, robust underwater DOA tracking with regard to uncertain environmental disturbances was studied. Because the uniform circular array (UCA) is free from the port and starboard ambiguity problem, a UCA was used to obtain the measurements for a long-time tracking scenario. First, a kinematic model of an underwater target and a measurement model based on the received signal of the UCA were established. Then, a DOA tracking algorithm was derived based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF), whose performance is significantly affected by the accuracy of the measurement noise covariance matrix (MNCM). Finally, considering that uncertain disturbances carry out unstable measurement noise, the modified Sage-Husa algorithm was used to obtain accurate MNCMs during the process of the derived EKF-based DOA tracking algorithm. Thus, a robust DOA tracking method with uncertain environmental disturbances using a UCA was proposed. The accuracy and reliability of the suggested method was verified via Monte Carlo simulations of a DOA tracking scenario and an experiment in the South China Sea in July 2021.