A technique of suppressing towed ship noise

An adaptive inverse beamforming and CLEAN image processing method (IBF-CLEAN) was put forward to cancel tow ship noise. The tow ship noise is a wideband, spatially wide distributing noise with high intensity. It is the primary interference for towed line array. Inverse beamforming (IBF) can be used to cancel such directional noise. Iterative use of IBF can eliminate the reflection paths of the tow ship noise which comes from slightly different directions. But because the reflection paths of the tow ship noise are adjacent to each other, it´s difficult for IBF to cancel the tow ship noise completely. Then an image processing method, CLEAN, was used to improve the results further. The sidelobes of the mainlobes and environmental noise can be cancelled efficiently by CLEAN. Combination of IBF and CLEAN makes use of the advantages of these two methods. IBF-CLEAN is a novel method which can improve the time/bearing display.