Innovative Broadband Signal Processing

"The overall technical objective of this SBIR is identificationof large-bandwidth, active-signal-processing techniques thathave the potential to provide significant sonar performanceimprovements in littoral environments. The importance ofoperating in littoral waters, increased noise backgroundconditions, and quieter threat submarines establish a highpriority for improved active sonar performance. In addition,threat submarines may deploy advanced acoustic countermeasuresfor avoiding detection and confusing target classification. Thedetection of slow moving submarines is often limited byreverberation in shallow water. Stronger and more complexmultipath propagation increases clutter, reduces the probabilityof detection, impacts target localization, and degrades targetclassification performance. Increased active signal bandwidthhas the potential to improve processing gain againstreverberation, improve target localization in range and bearing,help discern complex multipath structures and provide robustdetection and classification in the presence of acousticcountermeasures. Our effort will use an integrated systemapproach, which means that spatial processing, advanced transmitwaveforms, innovative signal processing, and feature extractionfor classification and tracking, will be areas of developmentwith the overall system performance improvement as the goal.BENEFITS: Completion of this effort (Phase II) will lead to the integration of a