Biquaternion Model of Vector Hydrophone Array and DOA Estimation Algorithm

In the traditional vector data expressions, the outputs of a single 3D vector hydrophone are reorganized into a complex vector, which cannot retain the orthogonality of the velocity elements. In this paper, biquaternion formalism is used to model the vector hydrophone’s output and a novel MUSIC-like algorithm is proposed to estimate the DOA (Direction-Of-Arrival) of the sources. The three velocity channels outputs are placed in the imaginary parts of the biquaternion numbers, which retains the orthogonality of the particle velocities and is robust to correlated/coherent noises. What’s more, the biquaternion data model has a compact way of handing multi-component data, which results a much less memory requirements compared with the traditional approach.