Adaptive Line Enhancer for Passive Sonars Based on Frequency-Domain Sparsity, Shannon Entropy Criterion and Mixed-Weighted Error

Abstract Adaptive line enhancer (ALE) is one of the vital signal processing techniques to the detection and recognition of underwater acoustic targets for passive sonars. Conventional ALEs, based on Gaussian noise assumption and least mean square (LMS) algorithm, can achieve good line enhancement property in Gaussian noise background. However, limited by the high steady-state misadjustment of LMS algorithm, the performance of conventional ALEs deteriorates under non-Gaussian noise background and degrades severely in processing signals with comparably lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, it’s of great necessity to improve the line enhancement performances of ALE techniques to meet the demands of engineering application in passive sonars. In order to optimize the robustness and adaptability of conventional ALEs in dealing with underwater acoustic signals with much lower-SNR and in non-Gaussian noise background, a modified ALE algorithm called frequency-domain ALE based on l 1 -norm, Shannon entropy criterion and mixed-weighted norm ( l 1 -SE-MWE-FALE) is proposed in this paper. The proposed l 1 -SE-MWE-FALE algorithm is based on the integration of frequency-domain sparsity, Shannon entropy (SE) criterion along with mixed-weighted error of LMS and least absolute deviation (LAD) to improve the ALE performance in situations above. The simulation results demonstrate that, when the input SNR is as low as – 25 dB, the local SNR (LSNR) gain for line spectrums by l 1 -SE-MWE-FALE is 9.8 dB, 3.7 dB and 2.3 dB higher than conventional ALE, l 1 -norm-based frequency-domain ALE ( l 1 -FALE) and l 1 norm-Shannon entropy criterion-based frequency-domain ALE ( l 1 -SE-FALE), respectively. Meanwhile, the simulation results also indicate that the parameters of the proposed method can be chosen loosely and hence are insensitive to the choice of their values. Furthermore, the processing results of two different kinds of real ship-radiated noise signals recorded by passive sonars also imply the advantages of the proposed method over the other three ALEs both qualitatively and quantitatively in the respect of line spectrum LSNR gain and parameter insensitivity. The simulation and experiment results both validate the performance insensitivity to parameter adjustment and hence exhibit a good perspective of applications for passive sonars.