Detector analysis for shallow water active sonar

SPAWAR Systems Center–San Diego, in concert with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has designed and built a proof-of-concept broadband biomimetic sonar. This proof-of-concept sonar emulates a dolphin biosonar system; emitted broadband signals approximate the frequency and time domain characteristics of signals produced by echolocating dolphins, the receive system is spatially modeled after the binaural geometry of the dolphin, and signal processing algorithms incorporate sequential integration of aspect varying returns. As with any sonar, object detection in shallow water while maintaining an acceptable false alarm rate is an important problem. A comprehensive parametric analysis of detection algorithms is presented, focusing primarily on two detector strategies: a matched filter and a spectral detector. The spectral detector compares the ratio of in-band to out-of-band power, and thus functions something like a phase-incoherent matched filter. This computationally efficient detector is shown to perform well with high proportional bandwidth signals. The detector (either matched filter or spectral) is coupled with an alpha–beta tracker which maintains a running noise estimate and calculates signal excess above the estimated noise level which is compared to a fixed threshold.