Bubble Pulse Cancelation in the Time-Frequency Domain Using Warping Operators

The received shock waves produced by explosive charges are often polluted by bubble pulses in underwater acoustic experiments. A method based on warping operators is proposed to cancel the bubble pulses in the time-frequency domain. This is applied to the explosive data collected during the Yellow Sea experiment in November 2000. The original received signal is first transformed into a warped signal by warping operators. Then, the warped signal is analyzed in the time-frequency domain. Due to the different features between the shock waves and the bubble pulses in the time-frequency domain for the warped signal, the bubble pulses can be easily filtered out. Furthermore, the shock waves in the original time domain can be retrieved by the inverse warping transformation. The autocorrelation functions and the time-frequency representation show that the bubble pulses can be canceled effectively.