EVALUATION OF TWO EFFICIENT TARGET TRACKING ALGORITHMS FOR MATCHED-FIELD PROCESSING WITH HORIZONTAL ARRAYS

Abstract

A tracking algorithm may be used to reduce the ambiguity of the positions of a moving underwater acoustic source. The objective of this paper is to evaluate two efficient target tracking algorithms suitable for use with Matched-Field Processing (MFP). The detection after tracking algorithms described here are applicable to targets moving linearly at constant speed and depth that produce low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) signals at the receivers. The input to the tracker consists of the positions of the largest Bartlett statistics or peaks on the MFP ambiguity surfaces. Even at very low SNRs, these largest peaks usually include the match at or near the source position sufficiently often that the detection performance of our efficient tracker rivals that of an exhaustive tracker. In this paper efficient algorithms are developed and evaluated based on examining either the sum of the uniformly weighted Bartlett array outputs or the sum of the Bartlett array outputs weighted by predicted received signal strength. This sum is evaluated along a set of linear tracks that connect the largest peaks. Detection performance is shown to be better for the signal-strength weighted tracker. The performance difference is largest for tracks along a constant bearing from the array.