A Track Initiation Method Based on Multiple Accumulation of Active Sonar Images

Abstract

To meet the requirements of autonomous detection of underwater moving targets in a strong reverberation background, a track initiation algorithm based on multiple accumulations of active sonar images was proposed to solve the problem of large amounts of data after space-time processing of active sonar echo signals. Firstly, the underwater multi-target track initiation model in the strong reverberation background of the active sonar was constructed. The range-azimuth-frame time three-dimensional sonar image was condensed into the range-azimuth two-dimensional sonar image by selecting the largest data of sonar images, and the accumulated frame information was retained. The measurement information and energy information of the target were obtained through the centroid clustering point extraction method, and the data preprocessing was completed. Secondly, the energy was accumulated in the parameter space of the Hough transform, and the initial track of multiple targets was obtained by the method of local peak detection. Finally, in order to improve the accuracy of the track, the reverberation and duplicate tracks were eliminated by using the velocity constraint and track merging method. The simulation results show that compared with conventional target tracking methods, this algorithm can effectively reduce the amount of sonar image data in the course of track initiation and can still achieve autonomous detection of underwater multiple targets with high detection probability in a strong reverberation background.

Keywords

• underwater multi-targets
• active sonar
• track before detection
• hough transform
• track initiation