Clustered Mixture Particle Filter for Underwater Multitarget Tracking in Multistatic Active Sonobuoy Systems

The problem of multitarget tracking in underwater multistatic active sonobuoy systems is challenging because of the large number of false contacts and multiple reflections that reach the receivers. Targeting a robust solution that can track an unknown time-varying number of multiple targets, while keeping continuous tracks even in scenarios with large number of false contacts per ping, a particle filter (PF)-based technique is proposed in this paper. The PF is a nonlinear filtering technique that can accommodate arbitrary sensor characteristics, motion dynamics, and noise distributions. An enhanced version of the PF called the mixture PF is utilized in this paper. While the sampling/importance resampling PF samples from the prior importance density and weights the particles according to the observation likelihood, the mixture PF samples from both importance densities and weights the different groups of particles respectively. The usage of this mixture of importance densities provides better performance and faster convergence to the true targets locations. In order to track an unknown time-varying number of targets, two mixture PFs are used (one for target detection and the other for tracking multiple targets), and a density-based clustering technique. The first filter starts with random uniformly distributed samples over the surveillance area and resets every five pings. Just before the reset, the clustering technique runs to detect the clusters that corresponds to different targets and passes them to the second filter. The performance of the proposed technique is examined and demonstrated by different simulated scenarios and some real datasets from the SEABAR07 trial by the NATO Underwater Research Center.