A waveguide invariant adaptive matched filter for active sonar target depth classification

This paper addresses depth discrimination of a water column target from bottom clutter discretes in wideband active sonar. To facilitate classification, the waveguide invariant property is used to derive multiple snapshots by uniformly sub-sampling the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) coefficients of a single ping of wideband active sonar data. The sub-sampled target snapshots are used to define a waveguide invariant spectral density matrix (WI-SDM), which allows the application of adaptive matched-filtering based approaches for target depth classification. Depth classification is achieved using a waveguide invariant minimum variance filter (WI-MVF) which matches the observed WI-SDM to depth-dependent signal replica vectors generated from a normal mode model. Robustness to environmental mismatch is achieved by adding environmental perturbation constraints (EPC) derived from signal covariance matrices averaged over the uncertain channel parameters. Simulation and real data results from the SCARAB98 and CLUTTER09 experiments in the Mediterranean Sea are presented to illustrate the approach. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) for robust waveguide invariant depth classification approaches are presented which illustrate performance under uncertain environmental conditions.