Tian Zhou

Harbin Engineering University · Department of Physics

This paper concerns direction of arrival (DOA) estimation based on a sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) approach. We address two inherent problems of this class of DOA estimation methods: (i) a predefined dictionary can generate off-grid problems to a SBL DOA estimator; (ii) a parametric prior generally enforces the solution to be sparse, but the exist...

Direction of arrival (DOA) and source amplitude estimation are widely encountered in detection and communication as traditional array processing problems. Recently, sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) technique is increasingly exploited, which outperforms conventional compressive sensing (CS) approaches and provides an improved alternative for DOA and a...

The increasing development of underwater recording and processing systems has created a demand for automated methods that accurately detect and track small underwater targets in sonar images. However, precisely tracking such targets in underwater environments remains challenging. This article proposes an improved automated underwater multitarget tr...

Terrain matching positioning technology is used to locate underwater vehicles by the terrain information. The traditional method uses all real-time bathymetric points to traverse the underwater prior map, which has a large calculation amount and high complexity. To improve computational efficiency while ensuring accuracy, we represent the terrain m...

In recent years, multibeam sonar has become the most effective and sensitive tool for the detection and quantitation of underwater gas leakage and its rise through the water column. Motivated by recent research, this paper presents an efficient method for the detection and quantitation of gas leakage based on a 300-kHz multibeam sonar. In the propo...

The Inertial Navigation System (INS) is widely used for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) navigation with excellent short-term precision. However, the positioning error of INS accumulates along with time. It is imperative to appeal to other approaches to mitigate drift errors, especially for long-term sailing tasks. To that end, underwater Terr...

Underwater acoustic passive detection is the basis of target detection and recognition in underwater wireless sensor networks. However, with the development of noise reduction technology, the difficulty of passive detection on steady noise is increasing. Transient signals exposed by underwater targets under some circumstances are hard to be elimina...

Beamforming is extensively used in underwater acoustic imaging systems. As a high-resolution variety, a Bayesian compressive beamformer treats the acoustic echo of each snapshot independently and achieves enhanced recovery performance. However, its associated computational cost is extremely high compared with conventional beamformers, and its itera...

This letter presents a multi-target tracking algorithm—thresholded Sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (TH-SMC-PHD) algorithm. The TH-SMC-PHD aims to overcome the problem that underwater multi-target tracking is prone to missing tracking on sonar images, resulting in the breakage of trajectories. First, CA-CFAR and K-means are emp...

Dictionary learning methods are commonly employed in feature extraction, image inpainting and denoising. Appealing to the adaptive sparse representation of dictionary learning, a generalized dictionary learning framework is devised in this work, through which any dictionary learning approach can be applied straightforwardly to a linear model, e.g.,...

In order to solve the problem of false terrains caused by environmental interferences and tunneling effect in the conventional multi-beam seafloor terrain detection, this paper proposed a seafloor topography detection method based on fast two-dimensional (2D) Censored Mean Level Detector-statistics Constant False Alarm Rate (CMLD-CFAR) method. The...

In order to generate volumetric underwater acoustic images, planar arrays are often used to collect the signals coming from a 3-D scene in underwater environment. These acquired signals are commonly processed using the 2-D conventional beamforming method. The 2-D conventional beamforming is robust and the most commonly used method. However, the 2-D...

Multibeam imaging sonar has become an increasingly important tool in the field of underwater object detection and description. In recent years, the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm has been widely adopted to obtain stable features of objects in sonar images but does not perform well on multibeam sonar images due to its sensitivity...

Localizing greenhouse gas (e.g., CO2) leakage from the sub-seabed is essential for determining whether passive acoustic techniques can be an effective environmental monitoring tool above marine carbon storage sites. Here we develop an approach to verify the passive acoustic technique using hydrophones at different positions to localize a discrete n...

Compressive sensing (CS) is a promising technique recognized for its merits in recovering sparse signals with enhanced resolution entailing specific constraints. In recasting the CS model within a Bayesian framework, its formulation can be interpreted and solved under various prior assumptions that may correspond to, e.g., the $\mathcal {L}_{1}$...

Nested arrays exhibit higher spatial resolution (SR) and enhanced degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) with fewer sensors, and they have been utilized for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of both far-field (FF) and near-field (NF) sources. In this study, an improved symmetric nested array configuration with a given number of sensors was developed, which...

For millimeter-wave imaging systems, techniques pertaining to higher image quality seem attractive. Super-resolution (SR) approaches achieve better resolved results without extra system requirements. A computationally efficient SR imaging approach is proposed in this paper. The coherence factor (CF) is invoked and recast into the framework of range...

The inconsistency of magnitude and phase variations among the receiving array elements in multibeam soundings can seriously affect the beam pattern characteristics, which reduces the array gain, increases the side lobe level, and deteriorates direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The accuracy of the beamforming result may be improved by correcting...

In recent years, most multibeam echo sounders (MBESs) have been able to collect water column image (WCI) data while performing seabed topography measurements, providing effective data sources for gas‐leakage detection. However, there may be systematic (e.g. sidelobe interference) or natural disturbances in the images that introduce challenges for a...

In recent decades, imaging sonar has been the most widely employed remote sensing instruments in the field of underwater detection. The multibeam echo sounder (MBES) plays an important role in obtaining high-accuracy seabed topography. However, the resolution of the MBES substantially decreases with the increasing distance. Synthetic aperture sonar...

In recent decades, imaging sonar has been the most widely employed remote sensing instruments in the field of underwater detection. The multibeam echo sounder (MBES) plays an important role in obtaining high-accuracy seabed topography. However, the resolution of the MBES substantially decreases with the increasing distance. Synthetic aperture sonar...

Terrain‐aided navigation (TAN) is a promising technique to determine the location of underwater vehicle by matching terrain measurement against a known map. The particle filter (PF) is a natural choice for TAN because of its ability to handle non‐linear, multimodal problems. However, the terrain measurements are vulnerable to outliers, which will c...

To guarantee good sparsity reconstruction quality, a suitable dictionary should be as orthogonal as possible. Also, to reduce the coherence of a dictionary, a sensing matrix optimisation model should be formulated. In this model, a high‐dimension O(N) problem has to be considered because the sparse representation base is overcompleted, thus leading...

No PDF available ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been an increasing requirement for methods of detecting bubbles released from the seabed into the water column, such as leaks from undersea gas pipelines and seeps from carbon capture and storage facilities. Considering the peculiarity of the layout of submarine gas pipelines and that of the ocea...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Terrain matching navigation estimates the position of underwater vehicle by matching measured terrain against a prior map, which is attractive to fix the drift inherent to inertial navigation system. With a multi-beam bathymetric sonar, a local terrain is usually reconstructed by deterministic interpolation methods to matc...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Sparse bayesian learning has recently become successful in many compressed sensing problems. However, their performance critically relies on the appropriate tuning of numerous hyperparameters, because they directly control the statistical distribution and have a significant impact on the performance of the model is being t...

Terrain-aided navigation is a promising approach to submerged position updates for autonomous underwater vehicles by matching terrain measurements against an underwater reference map. With an accurate prediction of tidal depth bias, a two-dimensional point mass filter, only estimating the horizontal position, has been proven to be effective for ter...

High-resolution imaging method is one of the researching focuses of underwater acoustic detection. Underwater small-target detection also requires detailed imaging technology. Multibeam echo sounders (MBESs) and synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) are the effective instruments widely researched to obtain underwater acoustic images. Constrained by the th...

The detection accuracy of the multi-beam echo sounder (MBES) can be severely damaged due to the machining error of the transducer array. Thus, it is important to measure the directivity and the beam response of the multi-elements transducer array before system debug. The conventional array directivity measurement methods usually assume that the rec...

Recently, coprime array has been a popular research field in the application of direction-of-arrival estimation. Compared with uniform linear array, coprime array can be used to expand array aperture with fewer sensors, and it also has a nice direction-of-arrival estimation performance. According to coprime property, the direction of arrival can be...

The influence of the spatial distributions of bubbles on the propagation of linear acoustic waves in polydisperse bubbly liquids is studied. Using the diagrammatic approach, the effective wavenumber, which includes both spatial information and higher orders of multiple scattering, is presented. The phase speed and attenuation coefficient of acousti...

Sparse Bayesian learning has recently become successful in many compressed sensing problems. However, their performance critically relies on the appropriate tuning of numerous hyperparameters, because they directly control the statistical distribution and have a significant impact on the performance of the model being trained. Compared with manual...

Terrain matching navigation estimates the position of underwater vehicle by matching measured terrain against a prior map, which is attractive to fix the drift inherent to inertial navigation system. With a multi-beam bathymetric sonar, a local terrain is usually reconstructed from a prior map by deterministic interpolation methods such as the near...

In recent years, there has been an increasing requirement for methods of detecting bubbles released from the seabed into the water column, such as leaks from undersea gas pipelines and seeps from carbon capture and storage facilities. Considering the peculiarity of the layout of submarine gas pipelines and that of the ocean environment around them,...

Terrain matching positioning is a promising method to overcome the problem that the inertial navigation error of the underwater vehicle accumulates over time. In the conventional terrain matching method, all measurement points are commonly used for matching and positioning. However, this method fails to be taken into a balanced consideration on bot...

A new fast deconvolved beamforming algorithm is proposed in this paper, and it can greatly reduce the computation complexity of the original Richardson–Lucy (R–L algorithm) deconvolution algorithm by utilizing the convolution theorem and the fast Fourier transform technique. This algorithm makes it possible for real-time high-resolution beamforming...

Compressive (or namely compressed) sensing (CS) exhibits superior performance in sparse spatial spectrum estimation from a predefined vandermonde based dictionary. The CS theory requires that dictionary is as incoherent (orthogonal) as possible since the number of atoms is generally much more than observation vectors, and, namely, the dictionary is...

Multibeam Echo Sounder (MBES) and Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) are effective image sonar systems used as the major underwater observation instruments. The MBES system can get the full-scan detection without gaps, while the resolution on the along-track is limited by the beam width and the range. The SAS system can provide the high resolution inde...

Terrain aided navigation (TAN) is a promising approach to bound accumulated errors inherent to inertial navigation system by comparing terrain measurement with a reference map. Due to the non-linear nature of terrain, particle filters (PFs) are extensively studied for TAN because of its strong capability of dealing with non-linear problems. So far,...

New developments in multibeam technology now permit MBES to collect and record acoustic data not only from the strongest return (normally the seabed), but also echo returns from the complete travel paths of the acoustic pulse through the water column. This now allows they are established as standard tools for the remote detection of targets in the...

Multi-beam sonar imaging has been widely used in various underwater tasks such as object recognition and object tracking. Problems remain, however, when the sonar images are characterized by low signal-to-noise ratio, low resolution, and amplitude alterations due to viewpoint changes. This paper investigates the capacity of local higher-order stati...

This study addresses the detection of multiple objects in acoustic image. A fast two-dimensional (2D) subset censored constant false alarm rate (CFAR) method is proposed. The proposed method uses a multi-subset sliding window with reference cells and guard cells in 2D, and excludes the potential interference object by subset censoring. Specifically...

To solve the false terrain problem caused by the tunnel effect in the conventional multibeam seafloor terrain detection, a detection method of multibeam seafloor terrain based on the ADOS-CFAR (Amplitude Dichotomy Order-Statistics Constant False Alarm Rate) is developed. This paper first discusses the principles and existing problems of the OS-CFAR...

We study the cluster ensemble problem and propose a cluster ensemble approach based on subspace similarity (CEASS). From a subspace similarity perspective, we seek the optimal subspace which is most similar to the given subspaces corresponding to the cluster solutions to be combined.We formulate the cluster ensemble problem as an optimization probl...

For conflict existing between resolution and sidelobe influence in the conventional beamformer (CBF), the article mainly studies beam features and spatial resolution of hyper-beamformer (HBF). Computer simulation results demonstrate that HBF can synchronously improve spatial resolution and reduce sidelobe. Processing results of the sea trial data v...

Terrain matching navigation provides a capability for estimating position by matching real-time measurement of terrain to a terrain database. Since this process is without errors accumulating with time, it is very attractive as compared to limit the drift errors inherent in dead-reckoning or inertial navigation for underwater vehicles. The geometri...

The multipath spread in underwater acoustic channels is severe and, therefore, when the symbol rate of the time reversal (TR) acoustic communication using single-carrier (SC) modulation is high, the large intersymbol interference (ISI) span caused by multipath reduces the performance of the TR process and needs to be removed using the long adaptive...

The Multi-beam Synthetic Aperture Sonar is a new kind of the imaging sonar that combines the conventionality Synthetic Aperture Sonar and the Multi-beam Sounding Sonar. This paper based on the Multi-beam Synthetic Aperture Sonar theory introduces the Multi-beam Synthetic Aperture Sonar anechoic tank experiment. In this experiment there are two sepa...

A new subsample time delay estimator is proposed in this paper. It is evaluated based on the time delay property of the fractional Fourier transform and is suitable for processing chirp signals. The theoretic derivation of the algorithm is also presented. The validity and superiority to the fractional time delay estimator (FRTDE), the conventional...

In order to solve the problem that the existing time reversal communication scheme is hard to achieve simplex downlink communication, a time division multiplexing downlink communication scheme on basis of passive time reversal was proposed. Theoretical analysis and simulative research were carried out for the theory and performances of the proposed...

In order to obtain high-quality images of the seafloor geomorphology by using multibeam echo sounder, this paper researches the imaging method based on a multibeam interferometric principle. A multibeam interferometric algorithm was analyzed to estimate the Time of Arrival (TOA) and Direction of Arrival (DOA) of the seafloor echo. Using the TOA and...

In multibeam bathymetric systems, the presence of noise greatly reduces the reliability of phase difference estimation, and effective filtering is an urgent need. Aiming at the feature that the impact of noise varies over the measuring swath, the paper proposes a design of variable bandwidth filter. Compared with the fixed bandwidth filter commonly...

Passive time reversal approach can implement spatial and temporal focusing at a receiver array using measured channel impulse response and it is a useful method for one-way underwater acoustic communications. The spatial and temporal focusing can mitigate channel fading, reduce dispersion and increase signal strength. While intersymbol interference...

During the construction of hydraulic engineering, it usually needs high-resolution and integrated investigation of underwater topography and geomorphology, and shape and position of underwater construction or obstacle. Based on the multibeam interferometric echo sounder, this paper analyzes high-resolution bathymetric topography method of multibeam...

This paper analyzes and compares different clustering consensus functions. We analyze different consensus functions and compare them over several different document datasets. Our experimental results indicate that some consensus functions are consistently superior to the others, and can produce the best results.

Sub-pixel positioning is a key technology in geometry measurement field. Reckoning on the low accuracy of ordinary polynomial interpolation for sub-pixel positioning method because of losing the position of edge points, an improved Sobel edge detection method is first proposed, and then is applied to the thickness measurement system of cable sheath...

In this paper a novel document clustering spectral algorithm is proposed, which uses a minimum maximum principle. Firstly the low dimensional embedding of documents is attained by eigenvalue decomposition, and then a minimum maximum principle is used to get the initial seeds for k-means algorithm. Finally, K-means algorithm is performed to get the...

This paper introduces the Multibeam Synthetic Aperture Sonar line-by-line imaging algorithm which based on the traditional Multibeam sonar cross array structure. The Multibeam Synthetic Aperture Sonar is a combination of traditional Mulitbeam sonar and traditional Synthetic Aperture Sonar. It can have the better track direction resolution and get s...

To improve the seafloor image quality of multibeam bathymetric sonar, this paper introduced a seafloor imaging technology based on the multiple sub-array detection method. From the sequence of the time of arrival (TOA) and direction of arrival (DOA) of the echo signal from the seafloor which were estimated by the multiple sub-array detection method...

In multi-beam bathymetric sonar, noise is one of the most important disadvantageous factors that restrict the estimation precision. Fixed bandwidth filter is currently widely used to suppress noise in sonar systems. On the measuring swath, the impact of noise varies with the beam angle. Considering this issue, an algorithm of variable bandwidth fil...

In order to meet the demand in acoustical three-dimension (3D) imaging for small platform sonar and carry out the evaluation for submarine topography, a multi-subarray amplitude-phase joint detection algorithm with a dual-core OMAP5912 chip as a core processor was proposed based on the real time realization of DSP inner core. A set of 3D display fu...

If topography and geomorphology are asynchronously measured at different measuring points with a variety of sonar devices, a complex data fusion problem will be caused. In order to avoid this problem, a new technology is developed to the multi-subarray detection method which is used in multibeam bathymetry sonar. By doing this, it can obtain high q...

Clustering combination has recently become a hotspot in machine learning, while its critical problem lies on how to combine multiple clusterings to yield a final superior result. In this paper, a low dimensional embedding method is proposed. It first obtains the low dimensional embeddings of hyperedges by performing spectral clustering algorithms a...

Limited by the cost, the size of multibeam bathymetric sonar becomes smaller. It is a significant issue to increase the beamforming capability of small aperture array. As the most commonly used method at present, virtual aperture technique together with LPAE beamforming method is discussed in detail in the paper. Compared with conventional beamform...

This paper proposes a scheme for the realization of multi-beam synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) based on the multi-beam bathymetry and aperture synthetic principle, designs a new multiple receiver array structure, deduces correlative math model, and simulates the dot-by-dot imaging algorithm according to the novel array structure. Computer simulation...

The bathymetric data volumes produced by Multibeam echo-sounders are increasingly large and inevitably contain outliers which must be detected and eliminated. In this paper, an algorithm based on Least Trimmed Squares (LTS) estimator is presented for outlier detection and elimination. LTS estimator is a robust estimator with high Break-down Point (...

This paper introduces an underwater acoustic / optical integrated imaging system, which individual uses the DSP core and ARM core of the OMAP3530 processor to realize the multi-subarray amplitude-phase united detection algorithm and optical camera image collection for getting the estimating the depth of the sea and the optical information of the fo...

This paper introduces the design of an underwater acoustic/optical integrated imaging system, which respectively uses the DSP core to implement the multi-subarray amplitude-phase united detection algorithm, uses the OpenGL ES library run in the PowerVR core to realize the reconstruction of the 3-D acoustic image based on the depth values from the D...

An optimized subarray configuration was analyzed theoretically for the performance enhancement of interferometric algorithm used in multibeam bathymetric system, and the relationship between phase ambiguity existed in interferometric algorithm and subarray configuration was deduced theoretically. On the basis, a new multiple subarray-pairs interfer...

The seafloor high-frequency backscatter average statistics, including the backscatter strength and the backscatter cross section, are statistically analyzed. According to Gamma distribution model of the backscatter cross section, the probability density function (PDF) of the backscatter strength is derived, and it is proved that the backscatter str...

The phase difference principle is widely used nowadays to sonar systems used for sea floor bathymetry. The main drawback of this method is that the phase difference is measured with the problem of ambiguity. Hence, a given echo record versus time may be affected by several phase jumps. Here we deal with a new processing to remove this ambiguity whi...

Because parametric array can generate wide band and narrow beam low frequency signals, it is widely used in high resolution subbottom profiling. Parametric sonar has been one of the most effective equipment in seabed configuration detection and property identification. Emphases of this paper are on source signal correction of wide band parametric s...

Aiming at the problem of high resolution seabed terrain detection using multi-beam bathymetry system, a method of multiple sub-array space MUSIC (MSB-MUSIC) was proposed. This method combines the robustness of beam-forming and the high resolution character of space modeling, so it can be used to effectively implement high resolution seabed terrain...