Preserving Navigation Access for the War Fighter Development of an Acoustic Marine Life Watch System to Support Corps Channel Maintenance and Enhanc

This effort is focused on establishing U.S. Army Corps leadership in preserving navigation access for the war fighter through the development and implementation of an acoustic-based sensor system to detect, track, and classify large aquatic animals. The proposed high frequency imaging active sonar system is configurable to detect, track, classify, and alert to the presence of threatened and endangered marine animals and marine mammals, including, manatees, sea turtles, sturgeon, and dolphins, at a user specified range spanning several hundreds of meters. This effort will conduct a systematic study of the effects of complex underwater acoustic environments, as well as those of the target characteristics, on the performance of the proposed multibeam imaging sonar system. Preliminary testing of the hardware equipment and a cursory data-collection in a real-world environment will be performed and metrics such as detection range, resolution, water-column coverage, reverberation level, signal excess, and ease of deployment will be used to evaluate the system"s performance. Based on the system properties, on diverse environments, and on target characteristics, the work will identify and pre-select appropriate detection, tracking, and classification algorithms capable of delivering performance as specified by pre-determined detection rate, false alarm rejection rate, and classification accuracy metrics.