Advances in active sonar tracking

This paper provides an overview of an on-going research effort at the NATO Undersea Research Centre. In particular, we focus on the automatic tracking component of the active sonar signal and information processing chain that takes hydrophone data from multiple receivers and generates a unified surveillance picture. Novel features of our tracking approach include the determination and exploitation of statistically consistent contact measurement covariances, the use of a computationally efficient multi-hypothesis data association algorithm, and the instantiation of both centralized and distributed data fusion schemes to optimise tracking performance.