A study on the target detection method of the continuous-wave active sonar in reverberation based on beamspace-domain multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization

In this paper, a target detection method based on beamspace-domain multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization is studied when an echo of continuous-wave ping is received from a low-Doppler target in reverberant environment. If the receiver of the continuous-wave active sonar moves, the frequency range of the reverberation is broadened due to the Doppler effect, so the low-Doppler target echo is interfered by the reverberation in this case. The developed algorithm analyzes the multichannel spectrogram of the received signal into frequency bases, time bases, and beamformer gains using the beamspace-domain multichannel nonnnegative matrix factorization, then the algorithm estimates the frequency, time, and bearing of target echo by choosing a proper basis. To analyze the performance of the developed algorithm, simulations were performed in various signal-to-reverberation conditions. The results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate the frequency, time, and bearing, but the performance was degraded in the low signal-to-reverberation condition. It is expected that modifying the selection algorithm of the target echo basis can enhance the performance according to the simulation results.