• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.30-38
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose an underwater acoustic sensor fault detection method for passive sonar systems. In general, a passive sonar system displays processed results of array signals obtained from tens of the acoustic sensors as a two-dimensional image such as displays for broadband or narrowband analysis. Since detection result display in the operation software is to display the accumulated result through the array signal processing, it is difficult to determine the possibility where signal may be contaminated by the fault or failure of a single channel sensor. In this paper, accordingly, we propose a detection method based on the analysis of RMSCR (Root Mean Square Crossing-Rate), and the processing techniques for the faulty sensors are analyzed. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the precision of detecting fault sensors is measured by using signals acquired from real array being operated in several coastal areas. Besides, we compare performance of fault processing techniques. From the experiments, it is shown that the proposed method works well in underwater environments with high average RMS, and mute (set to zero) shows the best performance with regard to fault processing techniques.