Method of multi-platform cooperative localization and tracking for underwater targets

An approach for underwater acoustic targets localization and tracking based on bearings-only data from multi-platform was proposed.Multi-stage multiple hypothesis tracking method is used for filtering and association.In the first stage,multiple hypothesis tracking is only used to track the azimuths in the beam domain of each platform.In the second stage,the initial positions of the targets are estimated by the multi-platform joint likelihood probability,then the multiple hypothesis tracking method is used to associate the azimuth trajectory from different platforms,finally the extended Kalman filter algorithm is used to sequentially update the targets positions.The simulation results show that the method can achieve better positioning performance with less calculation than the single stage multiple hypothesis tracking method.The sea trial data processing results show that in the interference environment,the single-stage method loses the targets.However,the proposed multi-stage method achieves the full-time tracking of the targets,and the positioning error is within 70 m after convergence.The proposed method can reduce the impact of noise interferences on data association as well as target positioning,and can also solve the ambiguity problem of linear arrays,which is suitable for acoustic targets localization and tracking in mobile multi-platform scenarios.