Masking of Time-Frequency Patterns in Applications of Passive Underwater Target Detection

• Main Author: Jüri Sildam
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2010-01-01
• Series: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2010/298038

Spectrogram analysis of acoustical sounds for underwater target classification is utilized when loud nonstationary interference sources overlap with a signal of interest in time but can be separated in time-frequency (TF) domain. We propose a signal masking method which in a TF plane combines local statistical and morphological features of the signal of interest. A dissimilarity measure D of adjacent TF cells is used for local estimation of entropy H, followed by estimation of ΔH=Htc−Hfc entropy difference, where Hfc is calculated along the time axis at a mean frequency fc and Htc is calculated along the frequency axis at a mean time tc of the TF window, respectively. Due to a limited number of points used in ΔH estimation, the number of possible ΔH values, which define a primary mask, is also limited. A secondary mask is defined using morphological operators applied to, for example, H and ΔH. We demonstrate how primary and secondary masks can be used for signal detection and discrimination, respectively. We also show that the proposed approach can be generalized within the framework of Genetic Programming.