Performance of Doppler sonar is degraded by beam cross coupling errors. This performance degradation presents itself as the loss of precision and bias of velocity estimates output by the system. A model is proposed here to reveal the physical essence of the beam cross coupling. Specifically, the model can analyze the effects of environmental conditions and vehicle attitude on the coupling bias. Based on this model, a phase assignment method is also proposed to reduce the beam cross coupling bias. The results obtained for various settings validate the efficacy of the proposed method.
1. Introduction
Doppler sonar is an essential component in the underwater navigation systems (Blanford , 2018; Griswold, 1968), and error study (Cao , 2013; Taudien , 2017) of it is necessary. It was suspected for a long time that the beam cross coupling introduced measurement bias in the Doppler sonar (Doisy, 2004; Wanis , 2010; Zrnic, 1977). The coupling error is closely correlated with the distribution of the Doppler sonar transmission energy in space (Lentz , 2022; Polonichko and Romeo, 2007). Simply assuming that the vehicle attitude only affects the beam pointing (Cao , 2013) and ignoring the beam asymmetry (Zedel and Hay, 2002), the sidelobe energy (Pinkel, 1982) may oversimplify the effect of the geometric parameter on the spatial distribution of the beam energy. For the Doppler sonar, which transmits multiple beams simultaneously (Sarangapani, 2019; Verrier , 2021), the degree of beam coupling is closely related to the beam pattern, acoustic absorption, and bottom scattering (Purviance , 2022). Beam coupling bias is not strictly juxtaposed with bias due to environmental factors. Independent inspection of beam coupling bias may ignore the feature that environmental parameters influence coupling bias (Pinto, 2018a; Pinto and Verrier, 2022; Taudien and Bilén, 2016).
In conclusion, it is difficult to adequately discuss beam cross coupling errors by making too many simplifying assumptions about the role of different geometrical and environmental parameters. Hence, it becomes essential to clarify which factors affect the coupling errors. It is crucial to investigate numerical models that integrate physical characteristics to provide ideas for the elimination of beam coupling errors. The following two primary contributions are made in this paper: (1) Based on the physical assumption that the scatterers corresponding to different beams are statistically independent (Pinto, 2018a; Pinto and Verrier, 2022), the mechanism through which the beam cross coupling affects the estimated Doppler phase is clarified by using an autocorrelation function. A model of the Doppler phase echoes is developed by considering beam patterns, acoustic absorption, bottom scattering, and vehicle attitude. The focus of the study is to clarify through the coupling power factor whether and to what extent the environmental parameters and vehicle attitude affect the velocity estimation, which would help in evaluating the operating performance of the Doppler sonar quickly. (2) The variational law of coupling bias is clarified through a numerical model and a phase calculation formula. To eliminate the influence of the coupling deviation on the velocity estimation, the initial phase value of the Barker sequence in the transmitting pulse is adjusted with as the interval. On this basis, the transmitting order of the sub-pulses in different beams is changed to reduce the influence between the beams. The main contribution is introducing a waveform design method for eliminating beam cross coupling bias and evaluating its improved effect on velocity estimation under different conditions.
2. Numerical model
2.1 Beam cross coupling problem
2.2 Doppler sonar echoes model
3. Performance prediction
3.1 Effect of environmental conditions on coupling bias
To study the effect of the environmental conditions on the coupling error, the simulation is implemented by changing the related variables to and . As shown in Figs. 2(a)–2(f), the results of the numerical simulation correspond to the results of Eqs. (13) and (14), respectively. It is worth noting that the curves in Figs. 2(b) and 2(c) have a trend close to each other as α and h appear in Eq. (14) in the form of a product. Keeping this product constant, the effects of α and h on the coupling error can be balanced. In addition, since a smaller number of array elements will aggravate the influence of the sidelobes on the echoes, the errors in Figs. 2(a) and 2(d) are more significant when the number of array elements is small. For four beams, Eqs. (3) and (12) allow us to discuss the effect of the scattering intensity and absorption coefficient on . It is found in our study that the change in the α from 0 to 1 dB/m and that in the evolution of the from 0 to 1 make Rp increase by 1.8 and 3.5 dB, respectively. Therefore, we set as 1.8 and 3.5 dB, respectively. A direct comparison of the relative error is shown in Fig. 2(f). It can be seen that the error values are positively correlated with . The larger the value of , the more severe is the change in the error curve, which is consistent with Eq. (3). The critical feature of these curves is that the maximum value of the relative error is obtained when the Doppler phase is 0 radians. In contrast, the minimum value of the relative error is obtained when the Doppler phase is π/2 or π radians. These features are closely related to the Doppler shift values corresponding to different beams. In other words, it concerns how the Doppler sonar is mounted.
3.2 Effect of vehicle attitude on coupling bias
By updating the weighting function according to the new coordinates, the effect of the vehicle attitude on the coupling bias can be analyzed. The phase information reflects the motion of the measurement target, while the correlation coefficient can be used to measure the data quality (Brumley , 1991). Therefore, we first focus on the effect of the vehicle attitude on the amplitude and autocorrelation coefficient.
For a particular beam of the Doppler sonar, when the attitude of the vehicle changes, the echo intensity of other beams also changes with the vehicle's attitude. Then a negative effect enhances the signal from the sidelobe and weakens the effective signal from the mainlobe. The signal forming the sidelobe is not the one we expect. Instead, it is an interference signal that reduces the correlation of the echoes and affects the data quality [see Fig. 3(b)]. As expressed in Eq. (10), the actual Doppler phase is influenced by its distribution in space and the weighting value. When the velocity of the vehicle does not change, its corresponding spatial Doppler phase distribution remains constant, and the measured results tend to have a stable value at this stage. However, this stability is broken down when the attitude of the vehicle changes. The illumination angle and range of the beam also change with the change in the attitude of the vehicle, affecting the phase weighting values for different orientations and ultimately making the phase estimates deviate from their actual values. Figure 3(c) shows the details of the attitude affecting the weighting values. According to the spatial distribution and weighted values of the phases as shown in Fig. 3(c), the average Doppler phase values for beam A are 0.7111 and 0.7047 when the vehicle is rotated through +15° and −15° around the x axis, respectively, which deviate from the theoretical value of 0.7071. Table 1 shows in detail the effect of vehicle attitude on . If the vehicle is rotated by 15°, the maximum variation of exceeds 5 dB. An important insight from Table 1 is that the effect of the vehicle attitude on the coupling error is slightly more significant than the environmental factors in terms of the coupling power factor .
Rotation angle (deg) . | Beam . | x axis (dB) . | y axis (dB) . | Rotation angle (deg) . | Beam . | x axis (dB) . | y axis (dB) . |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
−5 | B | 0.00 | 1.72 | 5 | B | 0.00 | 1.72 |
D | 1.72 | 0.04 | D | 1.73 | 0.03 | ||
C | 1.72 | 1.76 | C | 1.73 | 1.77 | ||
−10 | B | 0.00 | 3.41 | 10 | B | 0.02 | 3.39 |
D | 3.50 | 0.07 | D | 3.49 | 0.05 | ||
C | 3.40 | 3.47 | C | 3.42 | 3.50 | ||
−15 | B | 0.00 | 5.02 | 15 | B | 0.04 | 4.98 |
D | 5.16 | 0.11 | D | 5.12 | 0.07 | ||
C | 4.99 | 5.10 | C | 5.04 | 5.15 |
Rotation angle (deg) . | Beam . | x axis (dB) . | y axis (dB) . | Rotation angle (deg) . | Beam . | x axis (dB) . | y axis (dB) . |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
−5 | B | 0.00 | 1.72 | 5 | B | 0.00 | 1.72 |
D | 1.72 | 0.04 | D | 1.73 | 0.03 | ||
C | 1.72 | 1.76 | C | 1.73 | 1.77 | ||
−10 | B | 0.00 | 3.41 | 10 | B | 0.02 | 3.39 |
D | 3.50 | 0.07 | D | 3.49 | 0.05 | ||
C | 3.40 | 3.47 | C | 3.42 | 3.50 | ||
−15 | B | 0.00 | 5.02 | 15 | B | 0.04 | 4.98 |
D | 5.16 | 0.11 | D | 5.12 | 0.07 | ||
C | 4.99 | 5.10 | C | 5.04 | 5.15 |
4. Proposed method
It is evident from Eq. (17) that when is and π, becomes constant as and π, respectively. The minimum estimation error is obtained at and π regardless of the variation in . Therefore, the coupling bias can be reduced by adjusting the actual Doppler phase near to or π. For this reason, the phase assignment method could be used to implement this operation. To avoid any velocity ambiguity, we choose as the phase adjustment value and limit the raw Doppler shift to a small range. Figure 4(a) shows the optimized waveforms for beam 1 and beam 2. In Fig. 4(a), the pulse for beam 1 is divided into two parts, where each of sub-pulse 1 and sub-pulse 2 consists of a 7-bit Barker sequence repeated four times. Unlike the previous emission waveforms, the phase of the Barker sequence is adjusted as a whole, with the modified steps of for sub-pulse 1 and for sub-pulse 2. For beam 2, the orders of pulse 1 and pulse 2 are interchanged. On the one hand, the phase adjustment interval is set to , which causes the echo Doppler phase to get concentrated around . According to the results obtained by analyzing Fig. 2(f) and Eq. (17), the coupling bias at this position has less influence. On the other hand, different adjustment directions of sub-pulse 1 and sub-pulse 2 make the sign of the phase estimation bias opposite, and the accumulation of their estimated results can effectively reduce the estimation bias. Figure 4(b) demonstrates the advantage of using the optimized waveform to estimate the phase. Compared to the original waveform, the phase estimation trend of the optimized waveform is smoother and close to the theoretical value due to the reduced effect of the coupling bias.
To further validate our method, the model developed in Sec. 3 was used to simulate data under different conditions. We adhere to the principle of single-variable and consider the coupled echo as an interfering signal superimposed on the ideal echo. Then the velocity estimation performance of the proposed method for echoes with varying signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), coupling powers, and overlap ranges is discussed [Figs. 4(c) and 4(d)]. In general, the estimation error of the optimized signal is significantly smaller than the original signal. When is −35 dB, the minimum relative error of the original signal is 0.203%. In contrast, the maximum relative error is 0.178%, without considering the noise and lag of coupling echoes. We can conclude that the optimum waveform can effectively attenuate the beam cross coupling error and ensure the measurement accuracy of the Doppler sonar at low velocities (less than ambiguity velocity).
5. Conclusion
Our model allows a more comprehensive and systematic examination of the coupling bias due to the combined effect of multiple factors and a rapid assessment of the operational performance of the Doppler sonar. In addition, we provide the phase assignment method to reduce the beam cross coupling bias by optimizing the initial signal phase. This understanding is capable of improving the Doppler sonar's accuracy. However, without any operation to eliminate the velocity ambiguity, this method would suffer from the limitation that a change in the initial phase of the transmitted signal will inevitably reduce the velocity range due to the phase ambiguity. In future work, it is potentially meaningful to propose a more efficient method to optimize waveforms that change the power distribution of the coupled signals in the velocity estimation without reducing the velocity range.
Acknowledgments
The work reported herein was jointly sponsored by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (Grant No. 22ZR1475700) and the development fund for Shanghai talents (Grant No. 2020011).