MAGNETO: Magnetometer-based ASW Guidance for Naval Enhancement of Tactical Operations

Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is a vital strategic national security concern. Submarine capabilities, weapons, and skills are advancing, and adversaries, such as China, have been steadily modernizing their forces. Although situational awareness is relatively easy to achieve above the surface, submarine threat information is often intermittent, ambiguous, and surrounded by clutter. The undersea environment is complex and variable and provides tactical advantages to submarines. The Navy has a growing need for novel methods to reliably track and classify submarines underwater when existing methods fail. Because a submarine is made of ferromagnetic materials, when it passes through a magnetic field it forms a magnetic moment that magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) sensors can detect and track. Charles River Analytics proposes Magnetometer-based ASW Guidance for Naval Enhancement of Tactical Operations (MAGNETO) to detect and track submarines using magnetometer data. MAGNETO employs commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors onboard ASW rotorcraft to accurately classify underwater objects using an energy-efficient, hierarchical, ensemble classifier based on deep learning techniques set in an open-architecture framework that integrates with the Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS).