Distance estimation of impulsive sound sources with application of the dedispersion transform

Abstract Shallow water acoustic waveguides have typical dispersion effects, and this phenomenon contains information about the distance from the source to the receiver. In this paper, a method is proposed to extract the distance of the impulse sound source based on the dedispersion transform. The method is environmentally adaptive and does not require known environmental parameters or guided sound sources. We use the sound pressure dedispersion transform and the sound intensity dedispersion transform to extract the difference between horizontal wave numbers and estimate the distance, respectively. The feasibility of the method is verified by simulation and sea trial data.