Challenges and methodologies in Passive Ocean Acoustic
Tomography: An approach based on ICA

A. MANSOUR, IEEE Senior Member

ECE depart., Curtin University
Perth, WA 6152, Australia.
mansour@ieee.org, http://ali.mansour.free.fr

March 5, 2010

Abstract
The main idea of this manuscript consists on
applying signal processing methods along with
statistical approaches to achieve the characteriza-
tion of a complex and hostile environment such as
the oceanic underwater environment. In order to
study, characterize (i.e. the measurement of the
pressure, the salinity, the temperature, etc.) and
extract the topographical features (depth, etc),
Ocean acoustic tomography methods are widely
used.

For many reasons, Passive ocean Acoustic
Tomography (PAT) configuration becomes more
attractive than the classic active one. However the
new passive configuration is more challenging. In
our project, some of the facing problems have been
addressed. In this manuscript, major problems are
described and a new separation scheme based on
modified ICA algorithms is proposed. Finally, our
experiment results corroborate the effectiveness of
our proposed approach.

KEY WORD: Underwater acoustic applications,
passive acoustic tomography, second order statistics
in frequency domain, multipath channel, sparseness
or non-stationary signals.