US-France Cooperative Research: Identification by Scattered Sound of an Object in a Shallow Sea

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This three-year award provides support for US-France cooperative research on the identification of underwater objects using scattered sound. The project involves the underwater acoustic group at the University of Delaware, led by Robert P. Gilbert, and the Laboratory for Mechanics and Acoustics of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), led by Armand Wirgin. They will study a class of acoustic inverse problems in a shallow sea. These problems are concerned with the identification of passive, undetermined objects. The unknown parameters of these objects are its location and with respect to some reference frame, its shape. The investigators will use an incident acoustic wave, which is scattered off an object and emits a signal. The detected signal will be analyzed, with the help of a computer, by means of a suitable inversion algorithm. The US research group has investigated successfully a case of a homogenous two-dimensional object in a reflective seabed. In this collaboration, their goal is to identify in real time a three-dimensional object in a non-homogenous sea. This collaboration takes advantage of complementary expertise of US and French investigators. The results may eventually be applied to searches for mines, navigational obstacles, wrecks, polluting waste deposits, and submarines.