Improvement of ray-based blind deconvolution through kurtosis-based phase correction

Ray-based blind deconvolution (RBD) has demonstrated remarkable performance on several in situ underwater acoustic data. RBD estimates the channel impulse response by compensating the source phase estimated by beamforming. However, when beamforming fails to achieve the desired signal-to-noise ratio, RBD fails to achieve the expected performance. To address this issue, we propose an improved RBD framework that uses the kurtosis of the channel impulse response to provide additional phase correction after beamforming. The proposed method is validated with the measurement data from the shallow-water acoustic variability experiment 2015 using a high-frequency (11–31 kHz) broadband source and a vertical line array of 16 sensors located approximately 3 km away. The results are compared with conventional RBD and discussed from an optimization point of view.