Reverberation that is highly correlated with the transmitted signal presents a major obstacle to effective array signal processing in shallow water environments. To address this issue, an underwater reverberation suppression method that is based on modal decomposition is proposed for uniform circular arrays. On the basis of the established array-element signal model for both target echoes and reverberation, the energy distribution characteristics of these two types of signals across different orders in the modal domain are analyzed. By leveraging the insights gained from this analysis, a weighting matrix is introduced into the conventional modal transformation matrix, thereby enhancing the target echoes and suppressing reverberation. Simulation and experimental results confirm that, compared with conventional beamforming techniques, the proposed method achieves significantly improved underwater reverberation suppression performance.
Du et al. (Mon,) studied this question.