Remote Localization of an Underground Acoustic Source by a Passive Sonar System

The aim of the work described in this paper is to develop a complex underground acoustic system which detects and localizes the origin of an underground hammering sound using an array of hydrophones located about loom underground. Three different methods for the sound localization will be presented, a time-delay method, a power-attenuation method and a hybrid method. In the time-delay method, the cross correlation of the signals received from the way of sensors is used to calculate the time delays between those signals. In the power-attenuation method, the powers of the received signals provide a measure of the distances of the source from the sensors. A new hybrid method has been developed for estimating the origin of the underground acoustic source by coupling both methods. The Nelder-Meade simplex search algorithm is then used to numerically estimate the position of the source in those methods. For each method the sound localization is carried out in three dimensions underground. The distance between the true and estimated origins of the source is in some cases less than 6m for a search area of radius 250m.