An MHT Approach to Multi-Sensor Passive Sonar Tracking

This paper proposes a distributed MHT approach to passive sonar tracking for a field of fixed and moving sensors. It includes single-sensor narrowband and broadband measurement-space tracking at each sensor, followed by 2D Cartesian multi-sensor fusion. Tracking and fusion are performed in real time, with a small delay due to the MHT processing with each component of the architecture. Specific innovations include the use of statistically-consistent measurement-space target statistics, unbiased solution cross-fixing for Cartesian initialization, robust distributed MHT track scoring and management, and temporal uncertainty estimation to support targeting decisions.