Distributed Environmental Inversion for Multi-Static Sonar Tracking

This paper presents an approach for adapting a tracking algorithm to the acoustic propagation environment. This adaptation is performed by incorporating the expected target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) into the data association step through the measured contact amplitude. In this work, expected SNR is provided via acoustic modeling; estimates of bottom loss and scattering strength, required by the acoustic model, are obtained via inversion of the acoustic model based on measured multi-static sonar reverberation data. This paper shows that the use of distributed sensors provides improved estimates of the environmental parameters, and hence better estimates of the expected SNR