Environmental Data Fusion for Mine Warfare

The proposal centers on environmental data fusion for application to undersea warfare. That is the fusion of environmental data and associated sensor performance estimation with current acoustic sensor measurements in order to better detect and classifytargets such as mines. While the principle focus is acoustic mine countermeasure (MCM) systems, the work also has application to ASW active and passive acoustic sensors, and non-acoustic MCM and ASW systems.We plan a detailed study of environmental effects on the features used in MCM CAD/CAC. This information will be used to develop robust CAD/CAC algorithms for use in unknown environmental conditions and to develop adaptive CAD/CAC algorithms that can fuseenvironmental data for better performance. The benefits of the research will be a greatly increased capacity to make use of environmental data where available and to design systems that are robust to environmental change. These benefits will be realizedprimarily in acoustic mine countermeasure systems. The work will also benefit ASW active and passive acoustic sensors. The potential commercial application is to add environmental sensitivity to a great number of underwater sensor systems.