Unconstrained underwater multi-target tracking in passive sonar systems using two-stage PF-based technique

A robust particle filter (PF)-based multi-target tracking solution for passive sonar systems able to track an unknown time-varying number of multiple targets, while keeping continuous tracks of such targets, is presented in this article. PF is a nonlinear filtering technique that can accommodate arbitrary sensor characteristics, motion dynamics and noise distributions. An enhanced version of PF is employed and is called Mixture PF. The commonly used sampling/importance resampling PF samples from the prior importance density, while Mixture PF samples from both the prior and the observation likelihood. In order to be able to track an unknown time-varying number of multiple targets, two Mixture PFs are used, one for target detection and the other for tracking multiple targets, and a density-based clustering technique is used after the first filter. This article demonstrates the applicability of the proposed technique for the passive problem, which suffers from the lack of measurements and the small detection range of the buoys, especially for weak signals. A contact-level simulation was used to generate different scenarios and the performance of the proposed technique called Clustered-Mixture PF was examined with either bearing measurement only or bearing and Doppler measurements, and it demonstrated its high performance.