Assessment of mine hunting performance evaluation parameters across multiple side-looking sonar systems and frequencies

The adoption of autonomous underwater vehicles equipped with high-resolution side-looking sonars in mine countermeasures (MCM) operations has resulted in a requirement to quantify the effectiveness of these platforms; e.g., by the probability of correctly detecting and classifying mines along with the associated false alarm rate. Recently, the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) proposed a performance model based on a combination of parameters given a priori and measured in situ, resulting in a through-the-sensor approach to performance evaluation for the detection and classification part of MCM operations. In this paper we investigate whether these parameters are consistent across different sonar systems and frequencies. This is done on basis of data from the MANEX'14 sea trial off the coast of Levanto, Italy, which was organized by the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). This unique data set spans five different frequency bands with carrier frequencies at 25kHz, 72.5kHz, 100kHz, 300 kHz and 900kHz, gathered from two synthetic aperture sonar systems (CMRE's MUSCLE and FFI's HISAS) as well as a real aperture sidescan sonar system.