Track Before Detect for Low Frequency Active Towed Array Sonar

Abstract

Detection and tracking of weak targets in the complicated marine environment are the main challenge for low-frequency active sonar. Track before detect(TBD) technology uses the multi-frame correlation of the target to implement accumulation, and the target track is given at the same time as the target is determined, which is considered to be an effective way to detect weak targets. The TBD algorithm proposed in this paper first normalizes the data in the beam domain to suppress reverberation and clutter interference, and then reduces the data after the matched filtering to retain the information of the weak target as much as possible. Finally, the multi-frame distance-azimuth result after reducing is used to accumulate, and the accumulated result is projected into the parameter space by Hough transform to complete non-coherent accumulation. The simulation and sea trial data verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.