• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.74-80
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• 2001

Because of ocean waves, swell, steering corrections, etc, the hydrophones of a towed array will not live along a straight line. However the degradation of bearing estimation performance occurs when beamforming is carried out on the hydrophone outputs of an acoustic towed array which is not straight. So it is required to estimate the shape of the array for the improved beamformer output. In this paper, an iterative array shape estimation technique is presented, which is based on the use of the least squares polynomial fitting to the data from heading sensors. The estimation error and the influence of deformations on the performance of the conventional beamformer output are investigated. Finally, the suggested method is applied to the real system in order to investigate the applicability.