ABSTRACT
Sonobuoy is a disposable device that collects underwater acoustic information and is designed to transmit signals collected in a particular area to nearby aircraft or ships and sink to the seabed upon completion of its mission. In a conventional sonobuoy signal transmission and reception system, collected signals are modulated and transmitted using techniques such as frequency division modulation or Gaussian frequency shift keying. They are received and demodulated by an aircraft or a ship. However, this method has the disadvantage of a large amount of information being transmitted and low security due to relatively simple modulation and demodulation methods. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that uses an autoencoder to encode a transmission signal into a low-dimensional latent vector to transmit the latent vector to an aircraft or vessel. The method also uses an autoencoder to decode the received latent vector to improve signal security and to reduce the amount of transmission information by approximately a factor of a hundred compared to the conventional method. In addition, a denoising autoencoder, which reduces ambient noises in the reconstructed outputs while maintaining the merit of the proposed autoencoder, is also proposed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed autoencoders, we simulated a bistatic active and a passive sonobuoy environments. As a result of analyzing the sample spectrograms of the reconstructed outputs and mean square errors between original and reconstructed signals, we confirmed that the original signal could be restored from a low-dimensional latent vector by using the proposed autoencoder within approximately 4% errors. Furthermore, we verified that the proposed denoising autoencoder reduces ambient noise successfully by comparing spectrograms and by measuring the overall signal-to-noise ratio and the log-spectral distance of noisy input and reconstructed output signals.
ABSTRACT
The importance of active sonar is increasing due to the quieting of submarines and the increase in maritime traffic. However, the multipath propagation of sound waves and the low signal-to-noise ratio due to multiple clutter make it difficult to detect, track, and identify underwater targets using active sonar. To solve this problem, machine learning and deep learning techniques that have recently been in the spotlight are being applied, but these techniques require a large amount of data. In order to supplement insufficient active sonar data, methods based on mathematical modeling are primarily utilized. However, mathematical modeling-based methods have limitations in accurately simulating complicated underwater phenomena. Therefore, an artificial intelligence-based sonar signal synthesis technique is proposed in this paper. The proposed method modified the major modules of the Tacotron model, which is widely used in the field of speech synthesis, in order to apply the Tacotron model to the field of sonar signal synthesis. To prove the validity of the proposed method, spectrograms of synthesized sonar signals are analyzed and the mean opinion score was measured. Through the evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed method can synthesize active sonar data similar to the trained one.
Subject(s)
Artificial Intelligence , Sound , Models, TheoreticalABSTRACT
The feasibility of thermo-chemical destruction of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) was investigated using a batch reactor and two different (vertical and horizontal) types of continuous reactor. A simple batch reactor was first designed and constructed to examine applicability of thermal-chemical destruction of PCBs. It was evidenced from the batch test results that the destruction of PCBs in the insulating oil (40% PCBs, w/w) was accomplished via abiotic dechlorination and mineralization of PCBs with quicklime at 600 degrees C under nitrogen environment. PCB destruction efficiencies were obtained about 99.95%. The reaction was exothermic resulting release of heat by which the reactor temperature suddenly increased up to 750 degrees C at the incipient 30 min of the experiment. Two major end products, CaCl2 and carbon, were identified. For a practical purpose, two continuous reactors were developed and tested. The observed continuous test results indicate that over 99.99% of PCB destruction efficiencies were achieved when excess quicklime (>3Ca:1Cl2 as a molar basis) was used. Specifically, the horizontal continuous reactor was suitable in view of ease of solid transfer, which is essential for complete destruction of PCBs and for full-scale applications.
