Abstract:Employing underwater unmanned vehicle swarms equipped with active sonar to detect underwater targets in key maritime areas has become the preferred approach for locating “quiet” targets. However, ocean ambient noise often exhibits typical non?stationary, heteroscedastic, and impulsive characteristics, which degrade the performance of traditional parameter estimation methods based on Gaussian noise assumptions. To address this issue, this paper proposes a robust time-delay estimation method for target echoes based on weighted iterative sparse reconstruction with an Lq-norm constraint. By employing an Lq-norm loss function (0