A fuse-before-track approach to target state estimation using passive acoustic sensors
Chris Kreucher, Ben Shapo · 2011
Abstract 1- This paper describes a Bayesian fuse-beforetrack approach to detecting and tracking moving targets by fusing data from multiple passive acoustic arrays. We describe a surveillance application, where a collection of fixed location arrays are charged with monitoring a spatial region. Each array provides information only about target bearing relative to the array. The conventional approach is to track bearing at each array and then fuse the tracks to estimate XY position. Instead, in fuse-before-track, we fuse measurements before creating tracks. The fusion is done using a nonlinear filter, where non-thresholded measurements corrupted by non-Gaussian noise which are related nonlinearly to the desired target state are combined from all arrays in one tracker. We illustrate the algorithms’ efficacy on real, collected at-sea data.