Performance of Time Reversal Based Underwater Target Detection in Shallow Water

In this paper, a scheme based on the time reversal technique is proposed to improve the detection performance for detecting a cylindrical object bottoming at the seafloor in shallow water. When the time reversal technique is applied to the response of the clutter with the strong time-varying characteristic of shallow water, it is difficult to obtain a high peak response. However, in the case where a cylindrical object is placed on the seafloor because the time-invariant property of the target response is stronger than the time-varying property of the reverberation by the clutters, the time reversal technique can be applied to enhance the target signal. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the peak due to the target that is contacted at the seabed becomes higher when applying the time reversal technique. The performance is investigated by using numerical computation of the probability of detection for various probabilities of false alarm and computer simulation.