EFFICIENT ESTIMATION OF THE PROBABILITY THAT A SOURCE TRACK IS EXAMINED IN A MATCHED-FIELD PROCESSING TRACKING ALGORITHM

Tracking techniques may be used to reduce the ambiguity of an acoustic source's position in matched-field processing, particularly for low s ignal-to-noise ratios. An efficient tracking algorithm was recently de scribed, in which the performance would be comparable to that of an ex haustive tracker; that is, the probability that the source track is ex amined is close to unity for cases of interest, The current paper desc ribes an efficient technique to estimate the probability that the sour ce track is examined. The procedure involves the use of noise-only dat a to define statistical thresholds for the strongest peaks in the ambi guity surface. Once these thresholds are defined, the required probabi lities may be estimated by evaluating the ambiguity function for signa l-plus-noise data within a small region surrounding the known sourer l ocation, and identifying any peaks exceeding the thresholds. Results o f simulations obtained for a slanted array indicate that this approach provides an effective way to estimate the probability that the source track is examined.