Detection localization and tracking of aircraft using Sparse distributed passive acoustic system

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-10, Vol.142 (4), p.2555-2555
• Main Authors: Sedunov, Alexander, Salloum, Hady, Sutin, Alexander, Sedunov, Nikolay, Masters, David
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.5014341

Stevens Institute of Technology has conducted extensive long-term testing of acoustic systems designed to track low-flying small aircraft in remote location and recorded over 2 years of data. The system consisted of 4 nodes placed in difficult remote terrain with separation ranging 1–4 km, each node comprising a pyramid-shaped volumetric cluster of 5 microphones an embedded computer, and a pan-tilt-zoom camera steered to detected targets in real time. and communication device. Each nodes' computer performed direction of arrival finding communicated to a central computer collected that data and processed it to generate tracks and classify targets. The duration and the scale of the deployment allowed to identify and solve many problems, including the effects of propagation delays between station and on cooperative localization and tracking, the seasonal changes in environmental noise, persistent and transient noise sources, and the diversity of targets of opportunity and their signatures. The propagation delay effects led to development of separate trackers for review of target trajectories and for immediate action such as steering the camera. An overview of the algorithms is presented along with the long-term observations. [This work was funded by DHS’s S&T Directorate.]