Multistatic Active Sonar: Contact Association and Data Fusion

1With the advent of bistatic and multistatic active sonar systems, innovative techniques are required to maintain association of acquired and reacquired contacts. Contact association and data fusion will address three issues. The first issue concerns processing on a single receive platform, where incorrect associations of the Multistatic System Sonar (MSS) Sequential Detector are detected and corrected by the Geographic tracker. The second issue will address multiple receive platforms, with consort data fusion processing occurring on a single receive platform. ORINCON proposes to modify the MSS Information Processor (IP) to examine the performance and effectiveness of single hypothesis trackers (SHT) versus multiple hypothesis trackers (MHT) in the bistatic and multistatic operating environment. For the third issue, ORINCON will identify a method of recognizing and removing range-ambiguous contacts in the tracker, thereby reducing one false alarm contributor. ORINCON will identify performance enhancements over the current MSS tracker algorithm and demonstrate that a MHT tracker operating on ownship data and single hypothesis track data transfers from other receivers can provide better performance that single hypothesis trackers linked together.