An Expert System Approach to Underwater Acoustic Information Processing

Expert System Technology, an area of Artificial Intelligence, has been increasingly proposed as a vehicle for automation in a number of diverse areas such as continuous speech understanding, computer configuration, medical diagnosis, and the planning of genetic experiments. This paper discusses an effort to demonstrate an expert system based control structure for information processing in the realm of underwater acoustic surveillance. The information processing task is to separate data from disparate sources, and involves the fusion of information from two independent types of acoustic data. The expert system control structure is intended to minimize operator staffing and workload requirements by providing limited automated machine interpretation of large volumes of acoustic data, coupled with machine assistance in solving particularly difficult or ambiguous data-specific interpretation problems. The general utility and availability of Expert System Technology will also be discussed.