Modeling Specular Occurrence in Distributed Multistatic Fields

The effective fusion and tracking of multistatic active sonar contacts is challenging, due to high levels of false alarm clutter present on all sonar nodes. Utilizing the occurrence of high strength detections generated by the specular geometric condition, a cueing approach can be used to selectively extract further data which is stored locally on the individual sonar nodes. This approach can significantly reduce the false alarm rate at the input to the fusion/tracking algorithm, and reduce node-to-fusion- center communication link throughput requirements. The cost of this approach is increased detection latency, while waiting for specular cues to occur. For this concept to be viable there must be sufficient statistical probability that specular detections will occur within the field to initiate the cueing process. The specular detection cues will also have to occur with acceptable latency, compared to the ASW surveillance mission´s operational time scale. This paper describes a new modeling methodology which has been developed, enabling the evaluation of distributed multistatic fields for specular detection occurrence. Metrics are presented which enable this evaluation, and applications to example multistatic fields are shown.