Source Location and Tracking Capability of a Small Seismic Array

Abstract : Acoustic and seismic sensor array processing has many potential applications of interest to the Army. Recent military conflicts have clearly demonstrated the efficiency of smart weapons systems. A critical element in the effectiveness of many of these systems is their ability to discern and track a target in the presence of background noise. The Wide Area Mine (WAM) being developed by the U.S. Army is heavily dependent upon acoustic and seismic sensor information for bearing determination of targets. Weapon systems such as the WAM are designed to recognize, track, and destroy hostile military vehicles such as armor, mobile artillery, and heavy transport vehicles by deploying small arrays of passive acoustic and/or seismic sensors (microphones and geophones) to monitor local seismic and acoustic wavefields. A cartoon of the detection-attack scenario for the WAM device is shown in Figure 1.