Inversions of statistical parameters of an acoustic signal in range-dependent environments with applications in ocean acoustic tomography.

The paper presents an application of a method for the characterization of underwater acoustic signals based on the statistics of the wavelet transform sub-band coefficients in range-dependent environments. As it was illustrated in previous work, this statistical characterization scheme is a very efficient tool for obtaining observables to be exploited in problems of ocean acoustic tomography and geoacoustic inversion, when range-independent environments are considered. Now the scheme is applied in range-dependent environments for the estimation of range-dependent features in shallow water. A simple denoising strategy, also presented in the paper, is shown to enhance the quality of the inversion results as it helps to keep the signal characterization to the energy a significant part of it. The results presented for typical test cases are encouraging and indicative of the potential of the method for the treatment of inverse problems in acoustical oceanography.