Characterization of an Underwater Acoustic Signal Using the Statistics of the Wavelet Subband Coefficients

A novel statistical scheme for the characterization of underwater acoustic signals is tested in a shallow water environment for the classification of the bottom properties. The scheme is using the statistics of the 1-D wavelet coefficients of the transformed signal. For geoacoustic inversions based on optimization procedures, an appropriate norm is defined, based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), expressing the difference between two statistical distributions. Thus the similarity of two environments is determined by means of an appropriate norm expressing the difference between two acoustical signals. The performance of the proposed inversion method is studied using synthetic acoustic signals generated in a shallow water environment over a fluid bottom.