AUTOMATIC BROADBAND MATCHED FILTERING

The continually evolving threat, including quieter submarines and the reemergence of third world diesels, has significantly impacted narrowband system performance. As a result, future passive acoustic detection performance in many new tactical environments will be primarilly reliant on broadband processing. The inability to perform effectively under these evolving requirements will pose a significant threat to our overall ASW mission capabilities. New processing approaches focusing on the broadband acoustic threat characteristics in shallow water environments must be investigated to ensure the continued effectiveness of the ASW missions. The objective of this project is to evaluate existing algorithms and to identify and define innovative broadband processing algorithms for DIFAR sonobuoys. These broadband processing algorithms, by definition, will have improved detection performance over current techniques. These innovative algorithms will automatically sample different frequency bands and bandwidths to measure their energy content and will use this information to shape the frequency spectra. This will provide a dynamic adaptive matched filtering capability which will automatically maximixe the broadband signal to noise performance in real time. The adaptively filtered data will be directionally processed and sorted by bearing. The end result will optimize the overall broadband detection and bearing estimation performance of the DIFAR buoy.