Copyright © 2012 Xin Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Tracking underwater targets is a focused application area in modern underwater defence systems. Using traditional techniques based on imaging or sensor arrays may be difficult and impractical in some mission-critical systems. Alternatively, the underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is able to offer a promising solution. This paper tackles the problem of accurately tracking underwater targets moving through the UWSN environment. This problem is considered nonlinear and non-Gaussian where the present solution methods based on the particle filter technique are powerful and simple to implement. For three-dimensional underwater maneuvering target tracking, the traditional particle filter tracking algorithm may fail to track the targets robustly and accurately. Thus, the interacting multiple model method is combined with the particle filter to cope with uncertainties in target maneuvers. Simulation results show that the proposed method is a promising substitute for the traditional imaging-based or sensor-based approaches.