The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea ISSN:1225-4428(Print) 2287-3775(Online) 한국음향학회지

In modern passive sonar systems, a towed array sensor is used to minimize the effects of own ship noise and to get a higher SNR. The thin and long towed array sensor can be guided in a non-linear form according to the maneuvering of tow-ship. If this change of the array shape is not considered, the performance of beamformer may deteriorate. In order to properly beamform the elements in the array, an accurate estimate of the array shape is required. Various techniques exist for estimating the shape of the linear array. In the case of a method using a heading sensor, the estimation performance may be degraded due to the effect of heading sensor noise. As means of removing this potential error, weighted polynomial fitting technique for estimating array shape is developed here. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed method, we conducted computer simulation. From the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed method is more robust to noise than the conventional method.