The high-resolution underwater target detection has always been one of the important issues in the underwater acoustic signal processing.However

many of the high-resolution algorithms

such as MUSIC ESPRIT

suffer from poor estimation of the signal numbers which makes the direction-of-arrival (DOA) performance bad.A new high-resolution DOA method is proposed which makes use of the central moment without the prior information.The principle of the new method is explained and the advantage over other algorithms is discussed.Simulation result shows that the performance of proposed method which has good resolution and low sidelobe level is close to the conclusions of the theoretical analysis.