A Variational Bayesian Constrained EKF for Sonar-Based Underwater Target Tracking in Shallow Water

Accurate localization of underwater targets in shallow water is challenging because nonlinear sonar geometry, range-amplified angular errors, uncertain measurement noise, and environmental constraints jointly degrade state estimation. This paper proposes a variational Bayesian constrained extended Kalman filter (VB-C-EKF) for active-sonar-based underwater target tracking. A weak-maneuver motion model and an active-sonar range–bearing–elevation–Doppler measurement model are adopted, while bathymetric depth, speed, and reachable-region constraints are incorporated through sequential local Mahalanobis projection with a conservatively regularized covariance correction. To address unknown and time-varying measurement noise, the measurement-noise covariance is recursively estimated using a variational Bayesian scheme with an inverse-Wishart prior and a forgetting mechanism. In Monte Carlo experiments, the proposed method achieved an overall three-dimensional position RMSE of 7.57 m with a 95% confidence-interval half-width of 0.25 m, while maintaining zero depth/speed violations. Its mean normalized innovation squared and normalized estimation error squared were 4.04 and 6.79, respectively, and its average runtime was 0.225 ms per update. These results show that jointly adapting measurement uncertainty and enforcing physical constraints improves accuracy, feasibility, and covariance consistency under the simulated shallow-water conditions.