Effects of sensor placement on acoustic vectorsensor array performance, submitted to.pdfVIP

IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 24, NO. 1, JANUARY 1999 33 Effects of Sensor Placement on Acoustic Vector-Sensor Array Performance Malcolm Hawkes, Student Member, IEEE, and Arye Nehorai, Fellow, IEEE Abstract— We consider the role played by the sensor locations at a single point in space. Thus, while standard pressure in the optimal performance of an array of acoustic vector sensors. sensors can only utilize the directional information present First we derive an expression for the Cram´er–Rao bound on the in the propagation delays between sensors, each vector sensor azimuth and elevation of a single far-field source for an arbitrary acoustic vector-sensor array in a homogeneous wholespace and can extract further directional information directly from the show that it has a block diagonal structure, i.e., the source structure of the velocity field. This directional information location parameters are uncoupled from the signal and noise permits, for example, a single vector sensor to identify up strength parameters. We then derive a set of necessary and suf- to two sources [5]. By making use of this extra information, ficient geometrical constraints for the two direction parameters, arrays of vector sensors are able to improve source localization azimuth and elevation, to be uncoupled from each other. Ensuring that these parameters are uncoupled minimizes the bound and accuracy without increasing array aperture. means they are the natural or “canonical” location parameters Both theoretical and practical work has been published on for the model. We argue