Near-field/far-field azimuth and elevation angle estimation using a single vector hydrophone

This paper introduces a new underwater acoustic eigenstructure ESPRIT-based algorithm that yields closed-form direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates using a single vector hydrophone. A vector hydrophone is composed of two or three spatially co-located but orthogonally oriented velocity hydrophones plus another optional co-located pressure hydrophone. This direction finding algorithm may (under most circumstances) resolve up to four uncorrelated monochromatic sources impinging from the near field or the far field, but it assumes that all signal frequencies are distinct. It requires no a priori knowledge of the signals’ frequencies, suffers no frequency-DOA ambiguity, and pairs automatically the x-axis direction cosines with the y-axis direction cosines. It significantly outperforms an array of spatially displaced pressure hydrophones of comparable array-manifold size and computational load but may involve more complex hardware. This work also derives new Cramér–Rao bounds (CRBs) for various vector hydrophone constructions of arrival angle estimates for the incident uncorrelated sinusoidal signals corrupted by spatio-temporally correlated additive noise.