The application of Kalman filter on source depth discrimination in shallow water

Source depth discrimination is very important for underwater anti-submarine warfare. Based on the characteristic of underwater acoustic field excited by shallow source and deep source, this paper illustrates the reason why mode filtering can be used for source depth discrimination and clarifies the discrimination mechanism of trapped mode energy ratio and matched subspace discrimination. Then the performance of two depth discrimination methods is compared with numerical simulation and Swellex-96 vertical array data. While there is significant fluctuation in discrimination characteristic quantity extracted from experimental data, which leads to poor discrimination performance. In order to improve the discrimination performance, Kalman filtering and Kalman smoothing are used to estimate the depth discrimination quantity in this paper. Shallow and deep sources are obviously separable when Kalman filtering and Kalman smoother are used to estimate the depth discrimination quantity from experimental data.