In the field of underwater acoustic field prediction, numerical simulation methods and machine learning techniques are two commonly used methods. However, the numerical simulation method requires grid division. The machine learning method can only sometimes analyze the physical significance of the model. To address these problems, this paper proposes an underwater acoustic field prediction method based on a physics-informed neural network (UAFP-PINN). Firstly, a loss function incorporating physical constraints is introduced, incorporating the Helmholtz equation that describes the characteristics of the underwater acoustic field. This loss function is a foundation for establishing the underwater acoustic field prediction model using a physics-informed neural network. The model takes the coordinate information of the acoustic field point as input and employs a fully connected deep neural network to output the predicted values of the coordinates. The predicted value is refined using the loss function with physical information, ensuring the trained model possesses clear physical significance. Finally, the proposed prediction model is analyzed and validated in two dimensions: the two-dimensional acoustic field and the three-dimensional acoustic field. The results show that the mean square error between the prediction and simulation values of the two-dimensional model is only 0.01. The proposed model can effectively predict the distribution of the two-dimensional underwater sound field, and the model can also predict the sound field in the three-dimensional space.

Acoustic monitoring is an efficient technique for oil spill detection, and the development of acoustic technology is conducive to achieving real-time monitoring of underwater oil spills, providing data references and guidance for emergency response work. Starting from the research background of oil spills, this review summarizes and evaluates the existing research on acoustic technology for monitoring underwater oil spills. Underwater oil spills are more complex than surface oil spills, and further research is needed to investigate the feasibility of acoustic technology in underwater oil spill monitoring, verify the accuracy of monitoring data, and assess its value. In the future, the impact mechanism and dynamic research of acoustic technology in oil spill monitoring should be explored, and the advantages and differences between acoustic technology and other detection techniques should be compared. The significance of auxiliary mechanisms combined with acoustic technology in oil spill monitoring should be studied. Moreover, acoustic research methods and experimental techniques should be enriched and improved to fully tap into the future value of acoustic technology.

The Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) integrated with an acoustic modem is a novel mobile vehicle for data collection, which has an advantage in terms of mobility, efficiency, and collection cost. In the scenario of data collection, the USV is controlled autonomously along the planning trajectory and the data of underwater nodes are dynamically collected. In order to improve the efficiency of data collection and extend the life of the underwater nodes, a mobile data collection protocol for underwater nodes using the USV was proposed. In the protocol, the stop-and-wait ARQ transmission mechanism is adopted, where the duty cycle is designed considering the ratio between the sleep mode and the detection mode, and the transmission ratio is defined by the duty cycle, wake-up signal cycles, and USV’s speed. According to protocol, the evaluation index for energy consumption is constructed based on the duty cycle and the transmission ratio. The energy consumption of the protocol is simulated and analyzed using the mobile communication experiment data of USV, taking into consideration USV’s speed, data sequence length, and duty cycle. Optimized protocol parameters are identified, which in turn denotes the proposed protocol’s feasibility and effectiveness.

In underwater acoustic communication (UAC) systems, the channel characteristics are mainly affected by spatiotemporal changes, which are specifically manifested by two factors: the effects of refraction and scattering caused by seawater layered media on the sound field and the random fluctuations from the sea floor and surface. Due to the time-varying and space-varying characteristics of a channel, the communication signals have significant variations in time and space. Furthermore, the signal shows frequency-selective fading in the frequency domain and signal waveform distortion in the time domain, which seriously affect the performance of a UAC system. Techniques such as error correction coding or space diversity are usually adopted by UAC systems to neutralize or eliminate the effects of deep fading and signal distortion, which results in a significant waste of limited communication resources. From the perspective of the sound field, this study used experimental data to analyze the spatiotemporal fluctuation characteristics of the signal and noise fields and then summarized the temporal and spatial variation rules. The influence of the system then guided the parameter configuration and network protocol optimization of the underwater acoustic communication system by reasonably selecting the communication signal parameters, such as frequency, bandwidth, equipment deployment depth, and horizontal distance.

Underwater target recognition is a research component that is crucial to realizing crewless underwater detection missions and has significant prospects in both civil and military applications. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the current stage of deep-learning methods with respect to raw hydroacoustic data classification, focusing mainly on the variety and recognition of vessels and environmental noise from raw hydroacoustic data. This work not only aims to describe the latest research progress in this field but also summarizes three main elements of the current stage of development: feature extraction in the time and frequency domains, data enhancement by neural networks, and feature classification based on deep learning. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the process of hydroacoustic signal processing; demonstrate that the method of feature fusion can be used in the pre-processing stage in classification and recognition algorithms based on raw hydroacoustic data, which can significantly improve target recognition accuracy; show that data enhancement algorithms can be used to improve the efficiency of recognition in complex environments in terms of deep learning network structure; and further discuss the field’s future development directions.

Marine mammal acoustic signal recognition is a key technology for species conservation and ecological environment monitoring. Aiming at the complex and changing marine environment, and because the traditional recognition method based on a single feature input has the problems of poor environmental adaptability and low recognition accuracy, this paper proposes a dual-feature fusion learning method. First, dual-domain feature extraction is performed on marine mammal acoustic signals to overcome the limitations of single feature input methods by interacting feature information between the time-frequency domain and the Delay-Doppler domain. Second, this paper constructs a dual-feature fusion learning target recognition model, which improves the generalization ability and robustness of mammal acoustic signal recognition in complex marine environments. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the dual-feature fusion learning target recognition model are verified in this study by using the acoustic datasets of three marine mammals, namely, the Fraser’s Dolphin, the Spinner Dolphin, and the Long-Finned Pilot Whale. The dual-feature fusion learning target recognition model improved the accuracy of the training set by 3% to 6% and 20% to 23%, and the accuracy of the test set by 1% to 3% and 25% to 38%, respectively, compared to the model that used the time-frequency domain features and the Delay-Doppler domain features alone for recognition.