Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) provides a promising modulation technique for underwater acoustic (UWA) communication systems. It is indispensable to obtain channel state information for channel estimation to handle the various channel distortions and interferences. However, the conventional channel estimation methods such as least square (LS), minimum mean square error (MMSE) and back propagation neural network (BPNN) cannot be directly applied to UWA-OFDM systems, since complicated multipath channels may cause a serious decline in performance estimation. To address the issue, two types of channel estimators based on deep neural networks (DNNs) are proposed with a novel training strategy in this paper. The proposed DNN models are trained with the received pilot symbols and the correct channel impulse responses in the training process, and then the estimated channel impulse responses are offered by the proposed DNN models in the working process. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform LS, BPNN algorithms and are comparable to the MMSE algorithm in respect to bit error rate and normalized mean square error. Meanwhile, there is no requirement of prior statistics information about channel autocorrelation matrix and noise variance for our proposals to estimate channels in UWA-OFDM systems, which is superior to the MMSE algorithm. Our proposed DNN models achieve better performance using 16QAM than 32QAM, 64QAM, furthermore, the specified DNN architectures help improve real-time performance by saving runtime and storage resources for online UWA communications.

For K-distributed sea clutter, a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) is crucial as a desired property for automatic target detection in an unknown and non-stationary background. In multiple-target scenarios, the target masking effect reduces the detection performance of CFAR detectors evidently. A machine learning based processor, associating the artificial neural network (ANN) and a clustering algorithm of density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), namely, DBSCAN-CFAR, is proposed herein to address this issue. ANN is trained with a symmetrical structure to estimate the shape parameter of background clutter, whereas DBSCAN is devoted to excluding interference targets and sea spikes as outliers in the leading and lagging windows that are symmetrical about the cell under test (CUT). Simulation results verified that the ANN-based method provides the optimal parameter estimation results in the range of 0.1 to 30, which facilitates the control of actual false alarm probability. The effectiveness and robustness of DBSCAN-CFAR are also confirmed by the comparisons of conventional CFAR processors in different clutter conditions, comprised of varying target numbers, shape parameters, and false alarm probabilities. Although the proposed ANN-based DBSCAN-CFAR processor incurs more elapsed time, it achieves superior CFAR performance without a prior knowledge on the number and distribution of interference targets.

In underwater acoustic-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UWA-OFDM) systems, the performance of channel estimation is significantly affected by pilot allocation in the framework of compressed sensing (CS). However, for optimizing the pilot allocation, an exhaustive search method over all possible allocations is computationally prohibitive and random search method may not ensure convergence accuracy. In this paper, the meta-heuristic algorithm of the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is employed to address this issue. For reinforcing the capability of balancing exploration and exploitation, an enhanced variant of WOA termed EWOA is presented with four optimization strategies. After that, a joint algorithm combining CS with EWOA (CS-EWOA) is proposed for pilot allocation in UWA-OFDM systems. Through extensive simulations, the improvement of EWOA is demonstrated on the majority of benchmark functions over other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms. With regard to bit error rate (BER) and mean square error (MSE) for channel estimation, the proposed CS-EWOA algorithm outperforms the equispaced, random, genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and WOA-based pilot allocation methods. Moreover, it is robust with varying system subcarriers and channel models. Furthermore, the CS-EWOA exhibits superior convergence performance without increasing the computational complexity compared with the GA-, PSO-, and WOA-based methods in the iteration process of pilot allocation optimization. It can be concluded from the simulation results that the proposed CS-EWOA algorithm is competitive to optimize pilot allocation for channel estimation in UWA-OFDM systems.

For radar target detection, the selection of the optimal constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector usually relies on clutter distribution types. By integrating two types of Mean Level and log-t CFAR detectors, a reconfigurable hardware architecture is proposed and implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA). It allows to switch a suitable detector for specific clutter distribution and configure the parameters including the number of reference and guard cells, the threshold factor, and the desired false alarm probability. Synthesis results reveal its advantages of occupying 18% less hardware resources than the architecture that naively integrates two types of detectors. According to the experimental results, the proposed architecture can perform a processing speed of 100 MHz and require only 83 microseconds for a clutter of 8192 samples.