Design of low-power vector hydrophone acquisition and signal processing system

The self-contained vector hydrophone can simultaneously acquire sound pressure signals and three-dimensional vector field information. To meet the requirements of long-term underwater operation, high demands are placed on its data acquisition platform in terms of power consumption, data processing capabilities, and synchronous real-time storage speed. However, the reported vector hydrophone acquisition platform still has the problems of a limited number of acquisition channels and an inability to simultaneously achieve low power consumption and time-frequency domain analysis. Therefore, a self-contained vector hydrophone acquisition and storage data analysis platform based on the STM32F407 is proposed. This platform not only implements synchronous signal acquisition and high-speed storage for eight channels, but also includes functions such as FFT and frequency-domain cross-spectrum analysis, as well as direction estimation. The results of laboratory and offshore tests demonstrate that the system operates stably and achieves 8-channel real-time data acquisition and storage. The power consumption of each channel is approximately 0.16 W. Under the mode of joint time-frequency domain analysis of sound pressure and vibration velocity along with azimuth estimation, the system can work continuously for more than 10 d. This research lays a solid foundation for long-term, multi-channel simultaneous acquisition, storage, feature extraction, target detection and recognition of vector hydrophone underwater acoustic signals, while providing technical support for low-power acquisition and signal processing in multi-channel scalar hydrophone arrays.