SPECSweb tracking on a large, simulated multistatic field of the MSTWG

Effective fusion and tracking of multistatic active sonar contacts is challenging, due to high levels of false alarm clutter present on all sonar nodes. Such false alarms often overload the sensor-to-fusion-center communications links and fusion/tracking processes, producing too many false tracks. The Specular-Cued Surveillance Web (SPECSweb) multistatic tracker mitigates these problems by allowing track initiation to occur only when high-strength specular target detections are identified. Using these “specular” cues, and subsequent track state estimates, a selective data retrieval approach is used which significantly reduces the data rate at the input to the fusion/tracking algorithm, and reduces node to fusion-center communication link throughput requirements. This paper provides performance results of this tracking algorithm on a simulated multistatic data set from the Multistatic Tracking Working Group (MSTWG). The data set simulates a large multistatic field, and is characterized by low probability of detection (PD), high false alarm rate (FAR), and high measurement errors. The impacts of these challenging conditions on tracker performance are explained, including the degradation of association gating with large error in bearing measurements.