Tracking of Divers using a Probabilistic Data Association Filter with a Bubble Model

Detection and tracking of divers have become an important factor in port protection against underwater intruders. A problem arises from divers with open breathing systems because detections of the air bubbles they produce can mislead the tracking filter and sometimes result in a lost track. In this paper a probabilistic model is developed which reflects the probability that a false measurement originates from the bubbles. The novel contribution of this paper is the integration of this model in the probabilistic data association filter (PDAF) to improve the track continuity. The bubble detections may also cause confusion in the track initiation. To prevent this problem, a clustering method is proposed based on morphological operators which allows tracks to be initialized based on two-point differencing of the cluster centroids from succeeding scans. This morphological clustering method is included in a cell averaging constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) detector in such a way that both the point detections and their corresponding clusters can be fed to the tracking filter. These techniques are implemented and applied to real data of two divers, one with an open breathing system and the other with a closed breathing system, operating simultaneously in a coastal area. The real data were recorded from an active 90 kHz narrowband multibeam imaging sonar.