Tow ship interference suppression combined with blind temporal-spatial algorithm and adaptive beamforming

A novel method for suppressing tow ship directional interference was presented, which combined with conventional beamformer (CBF), blind source separation (BSS) algorithm, blind spatial extraction strategy and the well-known minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) algorithm. In the proposed method, firstly the CBF forms several beams to cover the array's endfire direction; secondly, a new frequency domain BSS algorithm based on temporal structure and nonparametric feature is derived to separate the tow ship noise components from the CBF's beams; thirdly, blind spatial extraction strategy which based on power spectrum correlation is used to obtain the array data without tow ship noise components; finally, the basic MVDR is utilized to estimate the interested targets' bearings by the cleaned array data obtained by the third step. Simulation results indicat the superiority of the proposed method compared to basic MVDR algorithm in the aspect of tow ship interference suppression. Applying the proposed method to towed array sonar data from sea trial shows that the method exhibits excellent capability in the aspect of weak target detection. And the proposed method would be promising in the practical application of real tow ship interference cancelling system. © 2011 by Binary Information Press.