Data fusion methodologies to support theater level and deployable surveillance systems

The goal of the Theater Acoustic Warfare/Data Fusion (ThAW) project was to develop technology to create and maintain a reliable maritime picture of surface and subsurface targets for a theater command center by fusing multi-sensor surveillance contact and parametric data. Sensor types included active and passive underwater acoustic, radar, and ESM/ELINT. The Deployable Autonomous Distributed Systems (DADS) Intra-Field Data Fusion Project seeks to develop technology to control and fuse sensor information from a field of autonomous sensors in littoral waters. This paper concentrates on the automated classification techniques developed for both the ThAW and DADS projects and the integration of the classification techniques with a multiple hypothesis correlator/tracker.