Specular-cued multistatic sonar tracking on the SEABAR'07 dataset

Effective fusion and tracking of multistatic active sonar contacts is challenging, due to high levels of false alarm clutter present on all sonar nodes. Such false alarms often overload the sensor-to-fusion-center communications links and fusion/tracking processes, producing too many false tracks. The specular-cued surveillance Web (SPECSweb) multistatic tracker mitigates these problems through implementation of two amplitude thresholds: a high threshold used to identify the occurrence of high-strength specular detections cues for track initiation, and a low threshold for selective extraction of additional detections for track extension forward and backward in time. This approach can significantly reduce the data rate at the input to the fusion/tracking algorithm, and reduce node-to-fusion-center communication link throughput requirements. A recent extension to the SPECSweb algorithm is the incorporation of bistatic range-rate measurements, and this implementation is described. The tracker is then applied to a challenging real multistatic data set obtained from the SEABAR'07 sea trial. The results shows effective tracking performance using this approach, yielding high quality target tracks with few false tracks. The method is shown to have excellent potential in reducing the overloading of the communication links, the automated tracking algorithm, and ultimately, the operator.