Improving the Quality of Magnetic Signature Reproduction by Increasing Flexibility of Multi-Dipole Model Structure and Enriching Measurement Information

Abstract

The paper presents the construction of a multi-dipole model that allows reproducing magnetic signatures of ferromagnetic objects. The virtual object used in the paper is an ellipsoid, which is the source of synthetic data. To make the situation more realistic, noise is added to the synthetic data. Two significant improvements compared to previous work are presented. Three-axial magnetometers are introduced instead of uniaxial magnetometers. However, a more important change is the modification of the model structure that allows placing dipoles on the entire plane, e.g. object's deck. The multi-dipole model consists of an a priori assumed number of permanent and induced single-dipole models. Each single dipole is described by three magnetic moments and, depending on the applied approach, one or two dipole position parameters. The non-linear least-squares optimization method is used to determine model parameters. To assess the quality of magnetic signature reproduction, qualitative and quantitative forms are used. The final quality assessment is based on differences between the reference fields and the fields determined from the multi-dipole model. The applied modifications bring significant improvement, however, only their combined application allows to restore magnetic signatures with good quality for directions other than for which the data were available.

Keywords

• Marine vehicles
• magnetic fields
• computational electromagnetics
• electromagnetic modelling
• curve fitting
• model checking