Application of cross-correlation methods for passive acoustic unmannded aierial vehicle detection and tracking
Alexander Sedunov, Alexander M. Sutin, Hady Salloum · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
Stevens Institute of Technology has applied the cross-correlation method for the detection of low flying aircraft using passive acoustics. A modified cross correlation method was tested for finding the time difference of arrival of acoustic signals from various unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), collected by NASA’s Langley Research Center. Cross-correlation was applied for UAV detection and for measurements of the time difference of arrival that is used for estimating the direction of arrival. The microphone separation combined with the high speed of the target had led to a significant differential Doppler effect leading to de-correlation of the received signals. For the compensation of those effects, Stevens applied a modified de-skewed short-time correlator (DSTC) approach. The detection ability of the cross-correlation method also depends on the cross correlation properties of ambient noise. The collection was performed in a relatively quiet area, to estimate the performance of the cross-correlation method in noisy areas the NASA UAV signatures were combined with ambient noise collected by Stevens. We demonstrate how the noise affects the detection distance. Special attention was paid to the influence of correlated components of the ambient noise. [The authors are grateful to Dr. Cabell (NASA’s Langley Research Center) for providing the acoustic data. This work was supported by DHS’s S&T Directorate.]