Abstract
The target spectrum, which is commonly used in feature extraction for underwater acoustic target classification, can be improperly recovered via conventional beamformer (CBF) owing to its frequency-variant spatial response and lead to degraded classification performance. In this paper, we propose a target spectrum reconstruction method under a sparse Bayesian learning framework with joint sparsity priors that can not only achieve high-resolution target separation in the angular domain but also attain beamwidth constancy over a frequency range at no cost of reducing angular resolution. Experiments on real measured array data show the recovered spectrum via our proposed method can effectively suppress interference and preserve more detailed spectral structures than CBF. This indicates our method is more suitable for target classification because it has the capability of retaining more representative and discriminative characteristics. Moreover, due to target motion and the underwater channel effect, the frequency of prominent spectral line components can be shifted over time, which is harmful to classification performance. To overcome this problem, we proposed a frequency shift-invariant feature extraction method with the help of elaborately designed frequency shift-invariant filter banks. The classification experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform traditional CBF and Mel-frequency features and can help improve underwater recognition performance.