Underwater Passive Acoustic Detection of Diver Propulsion Vehicles using a Phase-to-Graph Approach
Detecting small underwater vehicles like diver propulsion vehicles (DPVs) is highly challenging because conventional methods perform poorly under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. In this talk we will introduce our graph-based framework for passive acoustic detection using just a single hydrophone. The method maps the temporal phase transitions of a candidate tonal onto a directed graph, allowing the extraction of two discriminative topological features. Ultimately, numerical simulations show a favorable detection-to-false-alarm trade-off, and a sea experiment confirms reliable DPV detections beyond a 500-meter range.