A SIGNAL SYNTHESIS PROCEDURE DESIGNED FOR DISCREET OCEAN ACOUSTIC TOMOGRAPHY

To assess seabed geoacoustic properties, Ocean Acoustic Tomogra-phy (OAT) uses powerful active emissions of repetitive signals caus-ing problems when acoustic discretion is required as in military op-erations. A solution to avoid this disadvantage consists in develop-ing a new concept of OAT, called “discreet acoustic tomography”, which is based on stealthy acoustic signals emissions. In this paper, we propose an innovative strategy to synthesize, thanks to a global optimization method, signals which on the one hand maximize the estimation accuracy of underwater acoustic channel parameters and on the other hand, minimize the detection probability of active emis-sions by a nearby unknown interceptor. Finally, this procedure is ap-plied to a realistic shallow water scenario of which objective consists in hiding a synthetic signal in ship noise with the constraint to have an accurate estimation of the channel parameters. Results obtained illustrate the validity and the potential of the proposed method. Index Terms — Acoustic tomography, parameter estimation, sig-nal detection, optimization, performance analysi