We introduce a Bayesian estimation approach for the passive localization of an acoustic source in shallow water using a single mobile receiver. The proposed probabilistic focalization method estimates the time-varying source location in the presence of measurement-origin uncertainty. In particular, probabilistic data association is performed to match time-differences-of-arrival (TDOA) observations extracted from the acoustic signal to TDOAs predictions provided by the statistical model. The performance of our approach is evaluated using real acoustic data recorded by a single mobile receiver.

Cooperation among multiple autonomous surface and underwater vehicles is an important capability for detection and tracking of underwater objects. Cooperative autonomy in the underwater environment, however, is challenged by the communication bandwidth. In this work, we propose a selective communication scheme that underpins collaborative surveillance under communication constraints. This scheme classifies signal reflections of sonar pulses that are detected by on-board sensor processing as contacts with the object of interest or background using a convolutional neural network. This network is trained using previously labelled contact spectrograms obtained during three sea trials carried out between 2016-2018. The classification scores at the CNN output are ordered to select the few contacts that the underwater modem bandwidth allows for transmission to the network. First, we evaluate the accuracy of the data-driven information selection scheme using recall scores and similar performance measures. Then, we find the accuracy in Bayesian recursive filtering (tracking) of these contacts for different communication rates using established error metrics. The results suggest that the selective scheme yields a favourable surveillance performance communication cost trade-off.