A new method for processing passive sonar data

Processing passive sonar data involves detecting and monitoring tones present in an audio signal. A new method for processing passive sonar data is proposed. The method includes a pre-processing step using Radon and wavelet transforms, which is shown to improve the receiver operating characteristics of the data. After pre-processing, the extraction of continuously present frequencies from the data is treated as a multitarget tracking problem in the frequency-frequency rate domain. Frequency tracks are extracted using the probability hypothesis density filter from the theory of finite set statistics. Results from application of the method to both simulated and real passive sonar data are presented.