Detection of narrow-band sonar signal on a Riemannian manifold

We consider the problem of narrow-band signal detection in a passive sonar environment. The classical method employs a fast Fourier Transform (FFT) delay-sum beamformer in which the feature used in detection is the output of the FFT spectrum analyser in each frequency bin. This is compared to a locally estimated mean noise power to establish a likelihood ratio test (LRT). In this paper, we suggest to use the power spectral density (PSD) matrix of the spectrum analyser output as the feature for detection due to the additional cross-correlation information contained in such matrices. However, PSD matrices have structural constraints and describe a manifold in the signal space. Thus, instead of the widely used Euclidean distance (ED), we must use the Riemannian distance (RD) on the manifold for measuring the similarity between such features. Here, we develop methods for measuring the Fréchet mean of noise PSD matrices and optimum weighting matrices for measuring similarity of noise and signal PSD matrices. These are then used to develop a decision rule for the detection of narrow-band sonar signals using PSD matrices. The results yielded by the new detection method are very encouraging.