Abstract:
Detection and bearing estimation in shallow water is difficult due to multipath. As array
aperture increases, angular resolution increases and observation of multipath becomes more
likely. The SWellEx-96 experiment provides a publicly available dataset along with detailed
environmental information. Ray simulations suggest there are multiple arrival paths at the
arrays of interest. This thesis explores whether the horizontal line arrays deployed in the
SWellEx-96 experiment have enough angular resolution to observe multipath in their environment.
In the context of bearing estimation, the traditional, well established techniques
of conventional and minimum power distortionless response (MPDR) beamforming are compared
to a new multitaper beamforming framework proposed by Wage. The SWellEx-96
dataset requires the design of tapers for irregularly sampled data as the arrays are nonuniformly
spaced.
The multitaper array processor proves to be a useful tool, often displaying multipath
arrivals more clearly than the conventional and MPDR beamformers.
