Integrated Marine Mammal Monitoring and Protection System (IMAPS)

The IMAPS mission is to establish a global solution for protecting the marine environment through the development and implementation of a modular assessment and protection system. The limitations of current technologies are based on them being individually inadequate to fully achieve the mitigation objectives. All the sources of information related to the detection and classification of marine mammals such as active sonar, passive sonar, radar, visual and distribution databases need to be fused to provide a robust protection system. In order to successfully standardize, transport, interface and fuse the information being supplied and requested by the diverse sensor modalities, two essential took of the IMAPS global system are being developed: the Integrated Tracker and the Integration Architecture. The Integrated Tracker employs a data fusion algorithm that combines sensor information to refine estimates of target position, velocity, identity to provide integrated tracking and classification. A data fusion architecture has been chosen and a Bayesian approach for fusion and classification is developed. A data fusion and transport approach has been taken to develop a set of IMAPS prototypes that consist of simulated active sonar, passive sonar, radar and visual modalities communicating in real-time via the Integration Architecture, and to supply the sensor data, and other information necessary for the fusion, to the Integrated Tracker. The main functionality of the Integration Architecture is to provide information transport and common services in the form of a 'plug and play' capability, implemented with a software framework developed upon the Test & Training ENabling Architecture (TENA). The TENA software framework provides for the implementation of common software interfaces to disparate sensor modalities, thereby enabling the integration of different data sources using a common data representation and transport medium. Sensor outputs such as target detections and environmental information are being transformed in object-orientated data representations that are easily interpreted, manipulated, and interfaced. In addition to the Global IMAPS initiative, the active sonar modality was designed, built, and tested during the MAST 04 experiment producing detections of whales and preliminary synthesis of whale tracks.