Abstract: The traditional DOA (direction of arrival) estimation methods of underwater acoustic target often have poor estimation performance or provide inaccurate estimation result under the constraint of spatial sparse observation based on the small platform (such as unmanned underwarter vehicle). A new highaccuracy DOA estimation algorithm based on spatial compressive sampling for underwater acoustic target is proposed by analyzing the space sparsity of underwater target location. The algorithm is used to establish a spatial sparse description model of underwater target, and compress the underwater target in spatial domain, and then the joint sparse reconstruction algorithm is used to achieve the DOA estimation of underwater acoustic target. The simulation results show that the method can increase the DOA estimation accuracy in the case of less array elements and less snapshots, and the high success rate can be increased by more than 50%, and the root mean square error in the low SNR environment can be maintained at 02°or less.

Key words: marine engineering and technology, underwater acoustic localization, compressed sensing, unmanned underwater vehicle, sparse reconstruction