Improvement of non-negative matrix factorization-based reverberation suppression for bistatic active sonar

To detect targets with active sonar system in the underwater environments, the targets are localized by receiving the echoes of the transmitted sounds reflected from the targets. In this case, reverberation from the scatterers is also generated, which prevents detection of the target echo. To detect the target effectively, reverberation suppression techniques such as pre-whitening based on autoregressive model and principal component inversion have been studied, and recently a Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)-based technique has been also devised. The NMF-based reverberation suppression technique shows improved performance compared to the conventional methods, but the geometry of the transducer and receiver and attenuation by distance have not been considered. In this paper, the performance is improved through preprocessing such as the directionality of the receiver, Doppler related thereto, and attenuation for distance, in the case of using a continuous wave with a bistatic sonar. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed system, simulation with a reverberation model was performed. The results show that the detection probability performance improved by 10 % to 40 % at a low false alarm probability of 1 % relative to the conventional non-negative matrix factorization.