Geoacoustic model inversion using artificial neural networks

An inversion technique using artificial neural networks (ANNs) is described for estimating geoacoustic model parameters of the ocean bottom and information about the sound source from acoustic field data. The method is applied to transmission loss data from the TRIAL SABLE experiment that was carried out in shallow water off Nova Scotia. The inversion is designed to incorporate the a priori information available for the site in order to improve the estimation accuracy. The inversion scheme involves training feedforward ANNs to estimate the geoacoustic and geometric parameters using simulated input/output training pairs generated with a forward acoustic propagation model. The inputs to the ANNs are the spectral components of the transmission loss at each sensor of a vertical hydrophone array for the two lowest frequencies that were transmitted in the experiment, 35 and 55 Hz. The output is the set of environmental model parameters, both geometric and geoacoustic, corresponding to the received field. In order to decrease the training time, a separate network was trained for each parameter. The errors for the parallel estimation are 10% lower than for those obtained using a single network to estimate all the parameters simultaneously, and the training time is decreased by a factor of six. When the experimental data are presented to the ANNs the geometric parameters, such as source range and depth, are estimated with a high accuracy. Geoacoustic parameters, such as the compressional speed in the sediment and the sediment thickness, are found with a moderate accuracy.