ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to identify areas of particular interest at the time as well as areas that may be appropriate for future research. Topics cover are statistical representations of acoustic fields and consequent prediction uncertainties; advanced applications for inverse techniques and parameter estimation; acoustic impacts of oceanographic phenomena and rapid environmental assessments; developments in underwater acoustic networks, communications, and vehicles; and marine-mammal protection. The information content was quantified using the marginal posterior probability distributions of the geoacoustic parameters, as computed from a fast Gibbs sampling approach to Bayesian inversion. The chapter discusses specialized topics relevant to data processing in geoacoustic inversion: navigating parameter landscapes and Tabu search. A review of stochastic signal modeling efforts concluded that spread function models are efficient for computing lower-order statistics, although with limited capability.
