Leveraging Bayesian Optimization for Array Shape Self-Calibration in Underwater DoA Estimation

Abstract

Flexible sensing arrays are commonly used in underwater acoustic networks, but suppressed by unpredictable geometric deformations. Existing array shape self-calibration methods often estimate individual element positions separately, leading to a high dimensional optimization problem over long arrays. To address this problem, this paper proposes a Bayesian Optimization-assisted Geometry Estimation (BOGE) strategy operating with a hierarchical optimization process and a physics-informed parametric model for array geometry correction. BOGE formulates array shape self-calibration as an optimization problem, where candidate geometries are evaluated by the noise subspace residual. We perform Bayesian optimization to configure the physics-informed parametric model and then refine the selected geometry through numerical optimization. Empirical results show that BOGE achieves lower mean geometric root mean square error (RMSE) than the benchmark methods across a wide range of noise levels. On the public SWellEx-96 dataset, BOGE achieves a geometric RMSE of $0.659$ meters at $166$ Hz. A lake trial further shows that BOGE provides fixed source localization and moving target tracking performance comparable to the comparison methods.