Robust sparse reconstruction of attenuated acoustic field with unknown range of source.

In this paper, we present a gridless algorithm to recover an attenuated acoustic field without knowing the range information of the source. This algorithm provides the joint estimation of horizontal wavenumbers, mode amplitudes, and acoustic attenuation. The key idea is to approximate the acoustic field in range as a finite sum of damped sinusoids, for which the sinusoidal parameters convey the ocean information of interest (e.g., wavenumber, attenuation, etc.). Using an efficient finite rate of innovation algorithm, an accurate recovery of the attenuated acoustic field can be achieved, even if the measurement noise is correlated and the range of the source is unknown. Moreover, the proposed method is able to perform joint recovery of multiple sensor data, which leads to a more robust field reconstruction. The data used here are acquired from a vertical line array at different depths measuring a moving source at several ranges. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm both in synthetic simulations and real shallow water evaluation cell experiment 1996 data.