Reduction of False Alarm Rate in Distributed Multistatic Sonar Systems through Detection Cueing

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. This paper describes this concept and derives a method for determining the data lookup "snippets", given a detection cue. An evaluation of this cueing concept is made for a simulated multistatic sonar scenario. The results show the potential to significantly reduce the tracker input false alarm rate, in some cases by as much as three orders of magnitude.