Biblio
Explosive naval mines pose a threat to ocean and sea faring vessels, both military and civilian. This work applies deep neural network (DNN) methods to the problem of detecting minelike objects (MLO) on the seafloor in side-scan sonar imagery. We explored how the DNN depth, memory requirements, calculation requirements, and training data distribution affect detection efficacy. A visualization technique (class activation map) was incorporated that aids a user in interpreting the model's behavior. We found that modest DNN model sizes yielded better accuracy (98%) than very simple DNN models (93%) and a support vector machine (78%). The largest DNN models achieved textless;1% efficacy increase at a cost of a 17x increase of trainable parameter count and computation requirements. In contrast to DNNs popularized for many-class image recognition tasks, the models for this task require far fewer computational resources (0.3% of parameters), and are suitable for embedded use within an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle.
Tracking moving objects is a task of the utmost importance to the defence community. As this task requires high accuracy, rather than employing a single detector, it has become common to use multiple ones. In such cases, the tracks produced by these detectors need to be correlated (if they belong to the same sensing modality) or associated (if they were produced by different sensing modalities). In this work, we introduce Computational-Intelligence-based methods for correlating and associating various contacts and tracks pertaining to maritime vessels in an area of interest. Fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbours will be used to conduct track correlation and Fuzzy C-Means clustering will be applied for association. In that way, the uncertainty of the track correlation and association is handled through fuzzy logic. To better model the state of the moving target, the traditional Kalman Filter will be extended using an Echo State Network. Experimental results on five different types of sensing systems will be discussed to justify the choices made in the development of our approach. In particular, we will demonstrate the judiciousness of using Fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbours and Fuzzy C-Means on our tracking system and show how the extension of the traditional Kalman Filter by a recurrent neural network is superior to its extension by other methods.