Design of an adaptive noise canceller for improving performance of an autonomous underwater vehicle-towed linear array

Abstract Noise radiated from an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is one of the major sources of interference that impact the acoustic performance of its towed array sensor, especially during passive detection under low ambient noise conditions. In this paper, an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) based on the partitioned fast block least-mean-square adaptive algorithm is designed and applied to mitigate the AUV-radiated noise to improve the detection performance of a linear array towed by an AUV platform. The gain, defined as the ratio of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the input SNR, is taken as the metric for our ANC. Results obtained from processing the experimental data indicate that the gain of the ANC is up to 20 dB.