Automated approach for source location in shallow waters

Abstract: This paper proposes a fully automated method for recovering the location of a source and medium parameters in shallow waters. The scenario involves an unknown source emitting low-frequency sound waves in a shallow water environment, and a single hydrophone recording the signal. Firstly, theoretical tools are introduced to understand the robustness of the warping method and to propose and analyze an automated way to separate the modal components of the recorded signal. Secondly, using the spectrogram of each modal component, the paper investigates the best way to recover the modal travel times and provides stability estimates. Finally, a penalized minimization algorithm is presented to recover estimates of the source location and medium parameters. The proposed method is tested on experimental data of right whale gunshot and combustive sound sources, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.