Robust source localization in an acoustic waveguide

Matched-field source localization methods attempt to estimate the range and depth of a source in an acoustic waveguide. These methods give good results when the waveguide parameters are known precisely; however, matched- field methods have been shown to be very sensitive to model mismatch resulting from errors in the assumed environmental parameters. Described in this paper is an approach which minimizes model mismatch, caused by uncertainty in the sound velocity profile, by jointly estimating the environmental parameters and source location. An efficient way to initialize the maximum-likelihood search by projecting the received data onto subspaces corresponding to regions in parameter space is proposed. Monte Carlo simulation results in a shallow-water environment are reported