Robust source detection in shallow water

It is not possible, in practice, to precisely model a complex propagation channel, such as shallow water. This lack of accuracy causes a deterioration in the performance of the optimal detector and motivates the search for sub-optimal detectors which are insensitive to uncertainties in the propagation model. We present a novel, robust detector, which measures the degree of spatial-stationarity of the received field, exploiting the fact that a signal propagating in a bounded channel induces non-spatial-stationarity. The performance of the proposed detector is evaluated using both simulated data and experimental data collected in the Mediterranean Sea. This performance is compared to those of three other detectors, employing different extents of prior information. It is shown that when the propagation channel is not completely known, as is the case of the experimental data, the novel detector outperforms the others. That is, this detector couples good performance with robustness to propagation uncertainties.