ONR Graduate Traineeship Award in Ocean Acoustics for Sunwoong

The long-term goal of this research is to develop optimal array signal processing techniques for passive source localization in littoral shallow-water environments. It has long been known that multi-modal dispersion in a shallow water waveguide degrades the performance of bearing estimates by conventional plane-wave beamforming. This is due to spurious effects unique to the waveguide environment such as multiple peaks and beam spreading in the beamformer output [1, 2]. We have developed array signal processing techniques that account for and exploit multi-modal wave propagation and dispersion.