Experimental Demonstration of Acoustic Inversion Using an AUV Carrying Source

Abstract

This paper presents results of the sound speed profiles (SSPs) inversion using a data set obtained in shallow water of South China Sea in 2016 summer with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) carrying source. In-site acoustic data collected by the vertical line array (VLA) are analyzed and employed for the inversion of time-evolving SSPs. The inversion is formulated as a tracking problem with the state-space model, in which the SSPs are parameterized by the empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) to reduce the degree of freedom. The differ- ential evolution (DE) is implemented in the sequential process to maximize the a posterior probability. Results demonstrate the validation of the method for the SSP inversion, and the inversion errors are discussed.