Data fusion in a multistatic active sonar system for harbour protection

In this paper the results of a multistatic harbour protection trial are presented that was carried out in cooperation between WTD71 and ATLAS ELEKTRONIK. Three Cerberus diver detection sonars were installed inside a harbour basin transmitting simultaneously in different frequency bands. A centralised tracking approach was applied to fuse the detections. This means that the contacts of all available transmitter-receiver combinations were processed in one common tracker, namely a multiple hypothesis tracker. It will be shown that a multistatic detection system outperforms the single sensors. The main reasons for this are the higher detection rates and the exploitation of different aspect angles. As detection losses generally do not occur in all sensors at the same time, the combination of all contacts leads to a better probability of detection. Furthermore, the track false alarm rate of the multistatic system is lower since false alarms of a single sensor are not confirmed by other sensors.