Gain and Phase Autocalibration of Large Uniform Rectangular Arrays for Underwater 3-D Sonar Imaging Systems

In this paper, a new calibration method for gain and phase errors in large uniform rectangle arrays is proposed for underwater 3-D sonar imaging systems. It requires only one calibrator source at an unknown position in the far field. An efficient and speedy three-step-iteration algorithm is performed first to provide a robust direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimator in the presence of gain and phase errors. It then follows with the gain and phase errors estimation using a spatial matched filter. Finally, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) exercise is executed to further adjust the estimated phase parameters and the source direction. The statistical performance of the proposed algorithm will be demonstrated and compared to representative methods. It will be shown that the proposed method is computationally effective and asymptotically efficient in Monte Carlo simulations.