Multi-level Analysis and Fusion for Under Sea Threat Assessment (MAFUSTA)

Officers responsible for anti-submarine (ASW) warfare rely heavily on acoustic sensors to perceive conditions in their area of responsibility (AOR). Current systems require watchstanders to interpret manually the spatial and temporal relationships among contacts, to construct a tactical picture, infer the contacts"intentions, and assess the threat that each contact poses. The ASW Commander (ASWC) is often required to make time-critical decisions under rapidly evolving conditions and based on (1) brief or intermittent threat detections; (2) detections and track information from disparate types of sensors; (3) ambiguous classification and localization clues; and (4) difficulty in discriminating threat submarines from non-threat contacts in a cluttered and ever-changing tactical picture. We propose a Multi-level Analysis and Fusion for Under Sea Threat Assessment (MAFUSTA) system that analyzes data from multiple sources, and for each contact, answers the following questions: (1) What is the contact? (2) Where is the contact? (3) What is the contact doing? (4) What, if any, threat is posed by the contact? The system then displays the salient information in a way that enables the ASWC to make rapid but correct decisions about ASW threats.