Evaluation of the Performance of a Minehunting Sonar

Abstract

The performance of mine hunting sonars fluctuates with the environment, with target characteristics and with operator skill. Because of the variability the sonar performance cannot be reliably evaluated by a single measurement but must be determined as a statistical sampling problem. The detection performance can be assessed by conducting many detection runs at various target aspects and generating probability of detection curves and confidence limits from the results. These data can then be compared to the specified performance. In practice the environmental conditions inevitably deviate from the ideal, are never as specified and usually degrade sonar performance. The influence of the environment can be allowed for by using a sonar performance prediction model, which takes into account the prevailing conditions, to scale the specified detection range and using the range so scaled as the range to be demonstrated. In a similar sampling process the classification performance of a minehunting sonar can be evaluated by determining probabilities of correct classification against a range of mine like and non-mine objects.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA342568

Entities

People

  • J. L. Thompson
  • M. J. Bell

Organizations

  • Defence Science and Technology Group

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Australia
  • Behavioral Sciences
  • Classification
  • Confidence Limits
  • Contracts
  • Detection
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Information Exchange
  • Information Science
  • Measurement
  • Probability
  • Sampling
  • Statistical Sampling
  • Statistics
  • Test And Evaluation

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Acoustical Oceanography.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Systems Analysis and Design