Air ASW Full Field Scattering

The US Navy uses multistatic acoustic sensor systems with Air ASW aircraft, supporting acoustic sources and receivers in a coordinated ASW search and surveillance mission against submarines. Current systems suffer from high false alarm rates when operating in shallow water. The operator is the limiting factor in system performance for current systems which have to increase the detection and classification confidence threshold of echoes presented, sacrificing detection performance. Fusing together multiple echoes originating from the same target has the potential to reduce false alarm rates for the sonar system. By exploiting the full scattering field of the target's response to multistatic sources, additional echo reception opportunities can be used to confirm near-specular echo detections thereby improving sonar performance. We will extend the Phase I likelihood ratio tracking (LRT)/ Track-before-Detect (TbD) framework for exploiting the full scattering field effects available in ASW multistatic systems Our overall objective is to improve multistatic and networked ASW by utilizing automated track-before-detect technology. Improvements are sought for manned and unmanned sonar systems. Methods to improve Tactical Decision Aides will be considered, with LRT software operating in the background during actual tactical operations