Truncated Total Least Squares Regularization Method for Ocean Acoustic Tomography Inverse Problem

On the basis of the stream function field computed using a diagnostic model in the South China Sea in the summer 1998, the acoustic ray travel time tomography algorithm for reconstruction of two-dimensional flow field was tested by the numerical simulation in the region east to Vietnam. Error or noise contaminates the coefficients of both transfer matrix and measure data of the inverse equation of ocean acoustic tomography (OAT). Previous work on ill-posed problem in OAT commonly used Tikhonov regularization technology considering error only in observation data. Here, the truncated total least squares method (TTLS), which simultaneously considers error and noise on both sides, is applied for inverse solutions and its performances is compared with conventional Tikhonov method. The investigation suggests that the truncated total least squares method can substantially improve reconstruction of stream function field and is a promising alternative method for the solution of ocean acoustic tomography inverse problem.