Selective Information Transmission using Convolutional Neural Networks for Cooperative Underwater Surveillance

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.