Improved Sonar Detection Displays and Interfaces

"The acceptance of COTS by the DoD for military systems has been a key enabler for the accelerated growth of technological capabilities. Systems now exploit computing power that can double or more every eighteen months. Combat system development effortsare able to exploit these resources to achieve better performance through improved sensors, faster processing, advanced algorithms, and automation. Improvements to the operator interface for these systems have not kept pace with the flood of raw datadriven by new sensors and new processing techniques. Advanced data visualization has not been seriously examined for tactical applications other than training. Manual and automatic data correlation tools need to be provided to reduce sonar operatorworkload and provide Decision Support for the Officer of the Deck (OOD). Challenging contacts, poor acoustic environments, and search kinematics will continue to create forward endfire, dynamic encounter scenarios. Active emission alerts requireintegration at the contact management level to facilitate improvements in tactical control. This effort will establish new techniques and tools for reducing sonar operator overload and fusing other information sources for use by the sonar supervisor andthe OOD by managing and presenting information to allow full exploitation of today's system improvements.BENEFITS: This project will immediately benefit the submarine advanced development community and th