UDT Europe: Hunting the Hunter
The German Ministry of Defence's Technical Centre for Ships and Naval Weapons, Naval Technology and Research (WTD 71) will present on a Multi-Hypothesis Tracking (MHT) approach at this year's UDT Europe, which takes place at ExCeL, London, UK, from 7th to 9th June 2011.
With navies concerned by the diesel-electric submarine threat in littoral and regional checkpoints - yet ever more constrained in the number of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) assets they can deploy - force planners are increasingly looking at multi-static techniques as a way to get more for less.
Multi-statics offer an enhanced capability to detect quite submarines in both deep and littoral waters by using a combination of active sources and passive receivers. Whereas a monostatic sonar has a co-located transmitter and receiver, which means it will only receive incident energy arriving from one aspect, multi-static sonar uses many sources and receivers. This means that energy re-radiated from active sources can be picked up by a pattern of receivers which can take advantage of returns at multiple submarine aspects.
UDT Europe 2011 will examine how powerful multi-static concepts are now evolving to bring ASW into the 21st century, and swing the pendulum back in favour of anti-submarine forces.
WTD 71 will present on a Multi-Hypothesis Tracking approach that forms probable target tracks automatically and sequentially. MHT uses a powerful algorithm, incorporating Kalman filter techniques, to estimate target states based on sonar measurements containing measurement errors. While a fixed target motion model may lead to imprecise tracking results, the MHT approach adapts to target manoeuvres by estimating and adjusting the level of process noise in the Kalman filter equations appropriately. WTD 71's paper will illustrate the improvement in tracking performance based on the proposed manoeuvre-adaptive MHT for multi-static sonar data. These results will also be compared to cases obtained with the same MHT algorithm without the adaptation scheme.
The presentation will form part of the ASW stream within the conference which is sponsored by Ultra Electronics. The three remaining streams include Submarine Warfare, Harbour and Port Security and Mine Countermeasures.
