Automated Acoustic Monitoring System

Navy combat systems employ many underwater acoustic sensors to detect submerged threats. The performance of these sensors must be maintained at high levels for the combat system to perform effectively. These sensors are exposed to harsh environments and operating conditions that, over time, compromise sensor health resulting in degraded detection performance. Additionally, excessive radiated noise emitted from the platform may limit the performance of these sensors contributing to degraded sensor and system detection performance. Although the Navy currently monitors and presents operators sensor health and self-noise for many of its acoustic sensors; these data are not provided to the combat system for use in calculating sensor performance for threat detection or in maintaining an optimized system configuration. The U.S. Navy needs an automated acoustic monitoring system to alert operators to degraded sensor performance due to platform self-noise and sensor health, and making these data available to the combat system for use in calculating detection performance. HighRez Consulting?s expertise in the areas of beamforming, sensor self-noise monitoring, sensor metrics, performance prediction and system engineering within the AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 and AN/BQQ-10(V)A-RCI programs provides invaluable knowledge in strategies for successfully developing, testing, integrating, transitioning, and deploying the innovative technologies developed in this research.