Researchers

Douglas Abraham

Senior Principal Research Scientist

EIS Department

APL-UW

Funding

ONR

Code 321US

Performance Bounds for Estimating Time Delay and Radial Velocity
with Multiple Broadband Frequency-Modulated Pulses

APL-UW Technical Report 2303, August 2023

Abstract

Estimation of the location and motion of an object of interest is one of the primary inferential objectives in underwater acoustical remote sensing. In active sensing systems, this often begins with estimation of range through time delay and radial velocity by exploiting the Doppler effect. In systems that project a sequence of pulses, radial velocity can also be estimated from multiple time-delay measurements using waveforms insensitive to Doppler. The focus of this report is on performance bounds for estimation of time delay and radial velocity when using multiple frequency-modulated pulses that are not restricted to being narrowband. An emphasis is placed on the case of estimating radial velocity when time delay is also unknown while using combinations of the basic sonar waveforms: continuous-wave (CW), linear-frequency-modulated (LFM), and hyperbolic-frequency-modulated (HFM) pulses. A review of single-pulse bounds on the variance of unbiased estimators (i.e., Cramér-Rao lower bounds) is presented to facilitate development of bounds when combining echoes from multiple pulses. The pulse characteristic time-frequency properties comprising the single-pulse bounds are employed to provide multiple-pulse bounds that are straightforward to evaluate. As might be expected, the case of coherent echoes (i.e., echoes having a common bulk phase) generally leads to a lower bound on estimation performance than when the echoes are incoherent (i.e., they have different bulk phases). A number of examples are used to demonstrate multiple-pulse estimation performance. An important theme seen throughout the examples is that diversity across multiple pulses can have an outsize effect on parameter estimation (i.e., the bound decreases by a factor greater than the number of pulses). For similar types of pulses, spectral diversity improves time-delay estimation and temporal diversity aids estimation of radial velocity. Independent of this, diversity in the time-frequency character of the pulses (e.g., combining up- and down-sweeping LFM or HFM pulses) can provide a similarly significant improvement over the performance of any of the pulses alone.

Acknowledgments

This report was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Code 321US, Undersea Signal Processing. Funding was provided through Naval Sea Systems Command contract N00024-21-D- 6400 under task order N00024-22-F-8714. The author thanks Dr. D. Hague for reviewing this report.

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