Detection of Underwater Carrier-Free Pulse based on Time-Frequency Analysis

Carrier-free short pulse widely employed in UWB radar is brought into high-resolution sonar system, which has unique advantages: attaining more target information, restraining fluctuation of reverberation envelop efficiently in short-range detection and achieving accurate estimation. In essence such pulse is transiently short in time domain and wide in frequency domain, and as such it is difficult to separate signal to noise based on Fourier Transform spectrum. So as to seek for detection methods of short pulse, minor differences of energy distribution of time-frequency characteristics are presented on three time-frequency methods such as Short Time Fourier Transform, Wavelet Transform and Hilbert-Huang Transform. With these results, a tri-channel detector is established for such underwater short pulse in noise environment, which is generally suitable not only for detection module of underwater sonar system but also that of radar system.