Multistatic multihypothesis tracking: Environmentally adaptive and high-precision state estimates

Multistatic active sonar has become an important surveillance concept. To fully exploit its benefits in a real-time and realistic scenario, a multihypotheses tracking (MHT) algorithm is proposed which as a extension from standard approaches allows high precision state estimation, treatment of multiple different types of sonar signals and allows adaptation to the highly instationary ocean environment. The algorithm is applied to two data sets gathered at sea trials conducted by NURC, and its performance is compared to the performance of the standard MHT approaches. In particular, the proposed treatment of the Doppler information, exploiting the Doppler notch of the reverberation, similarly to applications in moving target indication for ground surveillance, has led to a large performance gain.