A Data Fusion Orientation Algorithm Based on the Weighted Histogram Statistics for Vector Hydrophone Vertical Array

In this paper, we propose a data fusion algorithm based on the weighted histogram statistics (DF-WHS) to improve the performance of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for the vector hydrophone vertical array (VHVA). The processing frequency band is firstly divided into multiple sub-bands, and the high-resolution multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is applied to estimate the azimuth of each sub-band for each vector hydrophone. Then, the weighted least square (WLS) data fusion technique is used to fuse the sub-band estimation results of multiple sensors. Finally, the weighted histogram statistics method is employed to obtain the synthesis results in the frequency domain. We carried out a simulation and sea trial of the 16-element VHVA to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Compared to several traditional processing algorithms, the beam width of the proposed approach is significantly narrower, the side lobes are considerably lower, and the mean square error (MSE) is effectively smaller. In addition, the DF-WHS method is more suitable to accurately estimate the target azimuth with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) because the noise sub-band is suppressed in the weighted histogram statistics step. The DF-WHS method in this article provides a new approach to improve the performance of deep-sea target detection for the VHVA.