CORRELATION-BASED ANALYSIS OF A GENERALIZED TARGET DESCRIPTION

Recently, a generalized target model was proposed in the literature. The objective of this work was to determine if the added complexity of the generalized model would allow substantially better performance, in terms of the mean-square-error and the average radius estimate, than that which could be achieved using the conventional target model. The scattering target was selected to be a hard acoustic sphere. The experimental results indicate that the order of the generalized model is dependent on the structure of the transmitted signal. Further, the generalized model results in a lower mean-square-error and a more accurate estimate of the sphere radius than the conventional model hi the noise-free case. When white Gaussian noise was added to the echo, the generalized model still retained the advantage of a lower average mean-square-error than the conventional model for all signal-to-noise ratios that were tested. The generalized model produces a better radius estimate than the conventional model at high signal-to-noise levels, but at low levels, the insensitivity of the conventional model to noise resulted in a better radius estimate.