CHE05 - Ocean Sentinels: Tracking the Unseen

Illegal underwater intrusions by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned underwater drones, Unmanned Surface Vehicles(USVs), and stealth maritime systems are emerging as major threats to coastal security, offshore infrastructure, naval operations, and marine research installations. Conventional underwater surveillance systems often suffer from limited directional accuracy, high deployment costs, and poor real-time localization capability in dynamic ocean environments.  This challenge focuses on the development of an intelligent underwater acoustic surveillance system capable of detecting, tracking, and geo-localizing underwater drones as well as unmanned surface intruder vehicles in real time using an intelligent system employing Acoustic Vector Sensor (AVS) array. The proposed system estimates the Direction of Arrival (DOA) and range of the acoustic source generated by the underwater vehicle and computes its real-time geographic position at sea with respect to the GPS coordinates of the deployed platform.  The system integrates underwater acoustic sensing, vector signal processing, beamforming, localization algorithms, and embedded real-time analytics to provide continuous situational awareness in maritime environments. By combining AVS array measurements with onboard GPS data, the platform generates accurate target position and heading, enabling real-time underwater threat monitoring and tracking.  Key objectives include:  Real-time DOA estimation of underwater acoustic targets Range estimation and target localization GPS-referenced geo-positioning of underwater intruders Noise-resilient underwater signal processing Embedded edge analytics for autonomous operation Visualization of moving underwater targets on a live map interface.

The solution has applications in coastal surveillance, harbor security, anti-intrusion defense systems, underwater border monitoring, offshore asset protection, and marine domain awareness.

An Algorithm as a backend and a dashboard running as a frontend

Data analyst, Data Scientist, signal processing algorithm developer, IT front-end developer