A Novel Feature Extraction Method for Ship-Radiated Noise Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Multi-Scale Permutation Entropy

In view of the problem that the features of ship-radiated noise are difficult to extract and inaccurate, a novel method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE) and a support vector machine (SVM) is proposed to extract the features of ship-radiated noise. In order to eliminate mode mixing and extract the complexity of the intrinsic mode function (IMF) accurately, VMD is employed to decompose the three types of ship-radiated noise instead of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and its extended methods. Considering the reason that the permutation entropy (PE) can quantify the complexity only in one scale, the MPE is used to extract features in different scales. In this study, three types of ship-radiated noise signals are decomposed into a set of band-limited IMFs by the VMD method, and the intensity of each IMF is calculated. Then, the IMFs with the highest energy are selected for the extraction of their MPE. By analyzing the separability of MPE at different scales, the optimal MPE of the IMF with the highest energy is regarded as the characteristic vector. Finally, the feature vectors are sent into the SVM classifier to classify and recognize different types of ships. The proposed method was applied in simulated signals and actual signals of ship-radiated noise. By comparing with the PE of the IMF with the highest energy by EMD, ensemble EMD (EEMD) and VMD, the results show that the proposed method can effectively extract the features of MPE and realize the classification and recognition for ships.