Multi-Static Active Sonar: Contact Association and Data Fusion

1The new high-powered sources for active sonar systems like MSS are expected to produce a much larger amount of "data", much of which is clutter. This situation will greatly complicate the information processing (IP) tasks, especially in the area of the already difficult data association problem. At the same time, all of the traditional tasks remain: fusion of contact reports from different sensors (possibly of different types), compensating for missed detections, etc. This proposal offers to meet these demands by decomposing IP into two stages: a data association stage, which will be accomplished by efficient and computationally inexpensive mathematical programming techniques, and state-estimation stage, which will be accomplished using traditional techniques on the pre-associated data. Experience has shown that this approach can work for the multi-static systems of interest.