Cascaded-Filter-Based Reverberation Suppression Method of Short-Pulse Continuous Wave for Active Sonar

Reverberation is the main background interference in active sonar and seriously interferes with the extraction of the target echo. Active sonar systems can use short-pulse continuous wave (CW) signals to reduce the reverberation intensity. However, as the pulse width of the CW signals decreases, the reverberation envelope exhibits a high-frequency oscillating phenomenon. Active sonar often uses the cell average constant false alarm ratio (CA-CFAR) method to process the reverberation, which steadily decays with transmission distance. However, the high-frequency oscillation of the reverberation envelope deteriorates the performance of CA-CFAR, which causes a higher false alarm rate. To tackle this problem, the formation mechanism of the high-frequency oscillation characteristics of the reverberation envelope of the short-pulse-width CW signals is modeled and analyzed, and on this basis, an α filter is designed to suppress the high-frequency oscillation of the reverberation envelope before applying CA-CFAR. The simulation and lake trial results indicate that this method can effectively suppress high-frequency oscillations of the reverberation envelope, as well as exhibit robustness and resistance to reverberation interference.