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arXiv · 2512.06417

Hankel-FNO: Fast Underwater Acoustic Charting Via Physics-Encoded Fourier Neural Operator

Abstract

Fast and accurate underwater acoustic charting is crucial for downstream tasks such as environment-aware sensor placement optimization and autonomous vehicle path planning. Conventional methods rely on computationally expensive while accurate numerical solvers, which are not scalable for large-scale or real-time applications. Although deep learning-based surrogate models can accelerate these computations, they often suffer from limitations such as fixed-resolution constraints or dependence on explicit partial differential equation formulations. These issues hinder their applicability and generalization across diverse environments. We propose Hankel-FNO, a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO)-based model for efficient and accurate acoustic charting. By incorporating sound propagation knowledge and bathymetry, our method has high accuracy while maintaining high computational speed. Results demonstrate that Hankel-FNO outperforms traditional solvers in speed and surpasses data-driven alternatives in accuracy, especially in long-range predictions. Experiments show the model's adaptability to diverse environments and sound source settings with minimal fine-tuning.

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BibTeXRIS

Yifan Sun, Lei Cheng, Jianlong Li, Peter Gerstoft. 2025-12-06. Hankel-FNO: Fast Underwater Acoustic Charting Via Physics-Encoded Fourier Neural Operator. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06417

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