Underwater Moving Target Classification Using Multilayer Processing of Active Sonar System

Abstract

The task of detecting and classifying highly maneuverable and unidentified underwater targets in complex environments is significant in active sonar systems. Previous studies have applied many detection schemes to this task using signals above a preset threshold to separate targets from clutter; this is because a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) target has sufficient feature vector components to be separated out. However, in real environments, the received target return’s SNR is not always above the threshold. Therefore, a target detection algorithm is needed for varied target SNR conditions. When the clutter energy is too strong, false detection can occur, and the probability of detection is reduced due to the weak target signature. Furthermore, since a long pulse repetition interval is used for long-range detection and ambient noise tends to be high, classification processing for each ping is needed. This paper proposes a multilayer classification algorithm applicable to all signals in real underwater environments above the noise level without thresholding and verifies the algorithm’s classification performance. We obtained a variety of experimental data by using a real underwater target and a hull-mounted active sonar system operated on Korean naval ships in the East Sea, Korea. The detection performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated in terms of the classification rate and false alarm rate as a function of the SNR. Since experimental environment data, including the sea state, target maneuvering patterns, and sound speed, were available, we selected 1123 instances of ping data from the target over all experiments and randomly selected 1000 clutters based on the distribution of clutters for each ping. A support vector machine was employed as the classifier, and 80% of the data were selected for training, leaving the remaining data for testing. This process was carried out 1000 times. For the performance analysis and discussions, samples of scatter diagrams and feature characteristics are shown and classification tables and receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curves are presented. The results show that the proposed algorithm is effective under a variety of target strengths and ambient noise levels.