Underwater moving source detection based on bearing estimation variance

By taking advantage of the difference in spatial distribution between underwater sound source and ocean ambient noise, a detector based on bearing estimation variance is proposed. The time delay estimation method is adopted to estimate the bearing of the source, and the test statistics is deduced to evaluate the performance of the detector. The results show that its performance is far superior to the widely used broadband energy detector. Data processing results in sea trials show that the proposed detector can detect a sound source much earlier than the energy detector.