Underwater Sonar Signals Recognition by Incremental Data Stream Mining with Conflict Analysis

Abstract

Sonar signals recognition is an important task in detecting the presence of some significant objects under the sea. In military, sonar signals are used in lieu of visuals to navigate underwater and/or locate enemy submarines in proximity. In particular, classification algorithm in data mining has been applied in sonar signal recognition for recognizing the type of surfaces from which the sonar waves are bounced. Classification algorithms in traditional data mining approach offer fair accuracy by training a classification model with the full dataset, in batches. It is well known that sonar signals are continuous and they are collected as data streams. Although the earlier classification algorithms are effective in traditional batch training, it may not be practical for incremental classifier learning. Since sonar signal data streams can amount to infinity, the data preprocessing time must be kept to a minimum to fulfill the need for high speed. This paper presents an alternative data mining strategy suitable for the progressive purging of noisy data via fast conflict analysis from the data stream without the need to learn from the whole dataset at one time. Simulation experiments are conducted and superior results are observed in supporting the efficacy of the methodology.