Maritime Vehicle

Tracking Using
Underwater Gliders and
Particle Filters
Ioannis Kyriakides, Ehsan Abdi, Daniel Hayes

Introduction
Tracking unidentified targets in a wide
surveillance area 24/7
Available maritime sensors
Expensive: deployment, maintenance or
Lower cost: low power, small size, low
payload capability (sensing, processing,
communications hardware)

Underwater Gliders
Autonomous underwater
vehicle
Uses efficient buoyancy
engine
Can carry light sensing,
processing, and
communications modules
Can form swarms
Need novel signal
processing methods for
target tracking

Underwater Gliders

Sparsity and Adaptivity

Sparsity: Enable continuous wide area
surveillance using sensors of low size, power,
and cost - reduce array length
Adaptivity: Use information from the tracking
process to improve accuracy and reduce
processing/communications
Simulations show that it is possible to track
seaborne targets using a swarm of underwater
gliders

Compressive Sensing
Compressive sensing of signals [1]
Sensing below the Nyquist rate
Preserving the information in sparse signals
Reducing sensor array length
Inexpensive hardware - low power sensing

Compressive Sensing and

Processing
Processing in the low dimensional space [2]
Matched filtering no reconstruction

Inexpensive hardware
Low power, processing, communications

Drawback
Signal power is reduced due to dimensionality
reduction
Noise power remains constant
SNR scaled by
where
[2]
CSP works well in high SNR environments
Need to design an adaptive method that improves
tracking performance while reducing sensing,
processing, and communications rates

Adaptivity - Tracking Information

Adaptive Compressive Sensing

and Processing
Fusion Center
Transmitted
Waveform
(active sensing)

Adaptive
Waveform
Configuration

Tracking
Received
Waveform
Sensor Nodes
(Compressive)

(Compressive)

Adaptive
Acquisition

Adaptive
Processing

(active sensing)

Adaptive
Transmission, Acquisition,
and Processing Mechanism

Tracking
Information

Adaptive Compressive Sensing

and Processing
Allows for sub-Nyquist sensing
Adaptively configures the acquisition and
processing method
Utilizes available tracking information
Improves SNR

State Evolution and Tracking

Information
State evolution
State to measurement space mapping

Probability of a signal element appearing

Configurable Sensing Matrix

Construction
Dictionary of signal elements - sparsity

Reduced dictionary due to prior information

Sensing matrix construction

Tracking Information
Representation (1)
Dictionary matrix includes signal
elements that may be appear in
the measurements at the next time
step according to sequential
estimation information

Tracking Information
Representation (2)
Diagonal matrix with the
probabilities of appearance of
signal elements in its diagonal
according to sequential estimation
information

The Configurable Sensing Matrix

The adaptive matrix contains tracking
information
Reduces the dimensionality reduction
to versus
to

Adaptive Sensing

Random matrix

Tracking Information

Nyquist Sensing: Set

=

Universal Compressive Sensing:

, set
=
Ignore
,

Measurement Acquisition and

Processing
Received waveform

Matched filter statistic

Glider design

Resolution in the target state space Compressive D=.1m

Resolution in the target state space Nyquist D=1m

Percentage of lost tracks versus the SNR

Percentage of lost tracks versus the SNR

Conclusions
Adaptive Compressive Sensing and Processing can
enable low power, small size, low payload capability
platforms to perform reliable wide area 24/7 surveillance
Exploit sparsity and information from the tracking
process to enable continuous wide area surveillance
using sensors of low size, power, and cost
Further work needs to be done to design sensor
packages and develop swarms of underwater gliders

References
[1] E. J. Candes and M. B. Wakin, An introduction to
compressive sampling, IEEE Signal Processing
Magazine, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 2130, 2008.
[2] M. A. Davenport, P. T. Boufounos, M. B. Wakin, and R.
G. Baraniuk, Signal Processing With Compressive
Measurements, IEEE J. of Sel. Topics in Signal Proc.,
2010, 4, 445-460.