Multistatic Transmission Loss (TL) Estimation

BAyesian Tactical Transmission Loss Estimator (BATTLE) is an innovative technology that Signal Systems Corporation (SSC) is developing for reducing active sonar clutter, and thus achieving workload reduction. BATTLE utilizes both historical and in-situ tactical measurements in a Bayesian framework to achieve a more robust and accurate transmission loss (TL) estimation, and uses this estimate to distinguish between target echoes and clutter.To reduce clutter, echoes that have too high a TL to be a reflection from a target are rejected. BATTLE approach uses a large number of environmental hypotheses to cover different conditions. Each hypothesis contains a two-way TL. By weighing each environmental hypothesis by its match with in-flight measurements, a robust estimation of the two-way TL for each snippet location is obtained. Bayesian updates using in-situ measurements re-compute which hypotheses fit the operational environment best as new direct blasts occur.While environmental uncertainty has often hampered attempts to effectively distinguish clutter from possible target echoes using TL, the performance of BATTLE to date provides strong evidence that considering a diverse array of possible environments and allowing in-situ direct blast and Airborne eXpendable BathyThermograph (AXBT) buoy measurements to infer weights for each is an effective strategy for overcoming this barrier.