Radar-Sonar Data Fusion for Enhanced Shallow-Water Surveillance

Due to the harsh underwater acoustic and surface search radar conditions in shallow littoral ocean areas, performance in detection, classification, and tracking of submarine targets is degraded by excessive clutter. Success against these targets necessitates data fusion and tracking of multisensor data from organic and off-board sensors. Based on ORINCON's Phase I analysis, a detailed integrated algorithm specification will be developed and demonstrated. ORINCON will build on the extensive experience it has gained in multisensor and multiplatform data fusion to reduce the development cost of a data fusion system capable of overcoming the inherent difficulties of shallow-water environments. Our recent involvement with Air Force E-3 multisensor and multiplatform data fusion will vastly reduce the time to develop the data preprocessing required to handle nonorganic radar surveillance information. An integrated algorithm for utilizing information generated by the shallow-water environment prediction tool will be designed. A proof-of-concept demonstration of the environmental information integration system is proposed as an optional task.