Adaptive Beamforming of a Towed Array During a Turn

Towed hydrophone arrays are used for determining the spatial characteristics of the underwater acoustic fields. The assumption that the hydrophone array lie in straight line is often made when the beamforming the hydrophone outputs. But when vessel turns, the direction-of-arrival estimation will be critically degraded if the array shape was still to be assumed straight. In this paper, an effective method was used to estimate the shape of towed array. The influence of the observed deformations in the shape of towed array on the performance of different DOA algorithms such as CBF, MUSIC and MVDR are discussed with simulated and real acoustic data.