A calibration method of high-precision transducer acoustic phase center under outfield experiments

This paper proposes a high-precision transducer acoustic phase center calibration method based on outfield experiments, which solves the issue that the acoustic phase center of the transducer does not coincide with the geometric center. The developed method involves the construction of a virtual long baseline by transforming a fixed beacon into a moving point in the carrier coordinate system via coordinate conversion. Meanwhile, it reverse-calibrates the acoustic phase center of each transducer on the array. The lake trial results indicate that the positioning accuracy of the proposed method is improved from 0.56 m (for the uncalibrated acoustic phase center) to 0.29 m.