Directional Interference Cancellation Using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Tow ship noise is a typical directional interference for towed line array sonar, nonstationary process with several characteristic properties, such as multi-path and angle dispersion, which greatly add the difficulty to cancel or suppress the noise. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a novel method used for processing nonlinear and nonstationary signals. Finite Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) are derived from the data adaptively. EMD is used here as a signal separation tool to separate the tow ship noise from the received signal. Sea trial data are used to verify its feasibility, and the result is promising.