Abstract: Ocean currents can regulate global heat distribution and reduce shipping costs. The previous methods for estimating the direction of current have not completely eliminated the correlation between current signal sources,resulting in poor estimation performance. Therefore,a method for estimating the current direction based on the improved MUSIC method was designed. Firstly,based on the collected current signals,the current array signal model is constructed,and the current signals are denoised to improve the quality of signal data. Then to reduce the impact of the correlation between current signal sources on the estimation results,the correlation of current signal sources is eliminated using the improved MUSIC method and the covariance matrix. The current bearing estimation model is constructed by calculating the correlation parameters of the signal sources. Finally,by converting the ocean current signal source,the estimation of the ocean current direction is achieved. In the simulation experiment,a portion of the South China Sea is used as the experimental object to evaluate the estimation performance of estimation methods under different spectral points. Compared with previous ocean current direction estimation methods,the designed ocean current direction estimation method based on the improved MUSIC method has an estimation accuracy of 97.2% and a better application effect.

Key words: improved MUSIC method, estimation of ocean current direction, ocean currents, method design