Maritime Surveillance Sensing Using Underwater High Frequency Acoustic Communication Receivers

Special Operations Command desires an innovative approach to augment underwater acoustic modems with a passive sensing capability to detect ships and submarines. While providing the existing communications function, it is feasible to take advantage of the existing infrastructure by tapping the digital data stream from the acoustic modem receiver front end, and apply additional detection and classification signal processing to provide this additional ship detection function. This could expand the role of acoustic modems from being communication nodes in the underwater information grid to having both sensing and communication capabilities. The Progeny Systems Corporation team will conduct the necessary engineering analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of automated detection and classification of shipping using a commercial acoustic modem as the sensing element. In our Phase I effort we intend to obtain relevant target and ambient signatures in commercial acoustic modem high frequency (HF) detection bands, develop detection algorithms through application of Acoustic Intercept and Ranging (AI&R) processing strings to the target signature and noise data sets, assess the suitability of applying submarine sonar classification algorithms to the detected signatures, and derive system requirements and develop the conceptual hardware and software design for the Phase II prototype.