Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition (UATR) remains one of the most challenging tasks in underwater signal processing due to the lack of labeled data acquisition, the impact of the time-space varying intrinsic characteristics, and the interference from other noise sources. Although some deep learning methods have been proven to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, the accuracy of the recognition task can be improved by designing a Residual Network and optimizing feature extraction. To give a more comprehensive representation of the underwater acoustic signal, we first propose the three-dimensional fusion features along with the data augment strategy of SpecAugment. Afterward, an 18-layer Residual Network (ResNet18), which contains the center loss function with the embedding layer, is designed to train the aggregated features with an adaptable learning rate. The recognition experiments are conducted on the ship-radiated noise dataset from a real environment, and the accuracy results of 94.3% indicate that the proposed method is appropriate for underwater acoustic recognition problems and sufficiently surpasses other classification methods.

The quantitative evaluations of mineral resources and delineation of promising areas in survey regions for future mining have attracted many researchers’ interest. Cobalt-Rich manganese crusts (Mn-crusts), as one of the three significant strategic submarine mineral resources, lack effective and low-cost detection devices for surveying since the challenging distribution requires a high vertical and horizontal resolution. To solve this problem, we have built an engineering prototype parametric acoustic probe named PPPAAP19. With the echo data acquired by the probe, the interpretation of the accurate thickness information and the seabed classification using the deep learning network-based method are realized. We introduce the acoustic dataset of the minerals collected from two sea trials. Firstly, the preprocessing method and data augment strategy used to form the dataset are described. Afterward, the performances of several baseline approaches are assessed on the dataset, and the experimental results show that they all achieve high accuracy for binary classification. We find that the end-to-end approach for binary classification based on a 1D Convolution Neural Network has a comprehensive advantage. Such a demonstration validates the possibility of binary classification for recognizing the ferromanganese crust only in an acoustic manner, which may significantly contribute to the efficiency of the survey.