ENLARGING NEURAL CLASS DETECTION CAPACITY IN PASSIVE SONAR SYSTEMS

FK Soares-Filho'$2,J. M. Seixas2, L. l? Caldba2

IPqM - Brazilian Navy Research Institute
R. Ipiru, 2 - Rio de Janeiro 21931-090, Brazil

Signal Processing Laboratory - LPS

COPPEBEAJFRJ - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
CP 68504, Rio de Janeiro 21945-970, Brazil
e-mail: [william,seixas,caloba]@lps.ufrJ.br

ABSTRACT level could be used to suggest the presence of "unknown"

A neural discriminating analysis is used for classifying pas-
sive sonar signals. Preprocessed information from the am-
plitude spectra of the noise radiated from ships is projected
onto only a few principal discriminating components for
feeding the input nodes of the neural classifier. Envisag-
ing practical applications, in which new incoming classes
not known by the time of the training phase have to be de-
tected in the production phase, a method is provided using
the identification of outliers to trigger the arriving of a new
class. Using experimental data, it is shown that up to 85%
of patterns from an untrained class can be identified, with-
out significant decrease on the efficiency of the classifer for
classes known beforehand.
1. INTRODUCTION
contacts, bringing the attention of the operator to them.
In this work, we first develop a method to detect "un-
known" arriving patterns using a decision threshold for the
output of a multilayer neural classifier. The confidence level
used is the a posteriori probability estimated by the output
of the neural network, trained using backpropagation [2].
This method is then tested to detect "unknown" classes, us-
ing real data from ships. A second method uses a clustering
neural network similar to the ART topology [3], but with
supervised training. The advantage of this method is that
it can be easily used to update the classification system to
include the new detected class.
The next section presents both detection methods for "un-
known" patterns. Section 3 shows experimental results on
new class detection and some conclusions are derived in
Section 4.

The sound is the best way for a submarine to access the sur-
rounding environment to detect and identify possible threats
[ 11. The submarine will use its passive sonar system to ana-
lyze sounds produced by several sources in the ocean. The
sonar operator is responsible for the identification of the re-
ceived signal and will make use of his ability to isolate and
identify features that will lead to the classification of the
interesting source. Automatic methods can be applied to
accelerate the decision task, and to reduce the work of the
sonar operator. The use of classifiers based on neural net-
works seems to be a good choice, due to their ability to deal
with high dimensional input data spaces, which is typically
the case for passive sonar applications.
When dealing with the situation where a different noise
arrives on the sensor of the sonar system, the operator will
probably react assigning an "unknown" label to that con-
tact until a proper identification can be provided. For an
automatic identification system, it would be interesting if
besides classifying contacts, the system could also provide
a confidence level to the classification. A low confidence
Partially supported by IPqM, FUJB, FAPERJ (Rio de Janeiro), and
CNPq (Brasilia), Brazil
2. OUTLIER DETECTION
Both detection methods developed are based on trigger-
ing the classifier for non-classified patterns, called outliers,
which fall outside the data distribution used in the training
phase. An outlier can be generated due to measurement er-
rors, noise, or the arriving of a new class of contact. The
decision on whether the outliers belong to an "unknown"
class or even to a known class but with a different machin-
ery configuration is the responsibility of the sonar operator.
He will probably use the full information available, includ-
ing that coming from other sensors (acoustic or not).
One important aspect to be considered is how often these
outliers appear in a given time interval. If the frequency of
the outliers is low, they might be due to noise or errors in
the whole data acquisition and processing chains. On the
other hand, if the frequency is high, the decision for new
class detection or for considering outliers as a subclass of a
known class may increase.
Once a given number of samples of such "unknown" class
has been detected, it is important to update the classifica-
tion system, so that further appearances of patterns from the

0-7803-7448-7/02/$17.00 02002 IEEE -

111 105

same class can be promptly recognised. The absorption of
the new information probably will be made some time later
by an offline training procedure, maybe using backprop-
agation on a multilayer feedforward network. Immediate
class absorption can be made by using clustering methods
to group these outlier patterns together, without having to
modify the main classifier itself.
2.1. Multilayer Neural Network
When a multilayer neural network is trained using the back-
propagation learning algorithm to identify one of M classes,
its output nodes estimate the a posteriori probability of a
given incoming pattern to belong to any of the classes as-
signed to the network output nodes [2]. These estimated
a posteriori probabilities could be used to produce a confi-
dence level for the class identification task. An appropriate
decision rule for declaring a given class to be the winner
in the discrimination problem under study is the Bayes rule
[4], generated from the estimate of the a posteriori probabil-
ity of each output node. This rule is known as MAP (max-
imum a posteriori) and gives non-ambiguous decisions (if
non-finite resolution is considered for computations).
If a decision threshold is defined, so that only net-
work outputs above such threshold are qualified as win-
ners, classes will be encapsulated in a region with a con-
trolled a posteriori probability. If, for a given pattern, none
of the outputs exceeds the decision threshold, the pattern
can be declared as "unknown" (not classified). Thus, with
the class encapsulation, the neural network can be used to
detect when a given pattern does not belong to any of the
classes used in the training phase.
2.2. Clustering Neural Network
Clustering methods can also be used to detect "unknown"
classes, when the clusters are encapsulated into a limited
region. In this work, it is used a clustering neural network,
similar to the ART topology, being formed by hyperspher-
ical neurons with variable vigilance radius, constructed us-
ing a supervised training algorithm.
In this network, a pattern gets classified by a given neuron
if it falls inside the vigilance radius of that neuron. When
more than one neuron qualifies for a given input pattern, the
winner will be the one with the highest similarity hnction.
Pattems that fall outside all vigilance radii are considered
not to belong to the classes used in the training phase, and
are declared to be "unknown".
3. NEW CLASS DETECTION
Experimental data were used to test the detection of new
classes. Data correspond to the radiated noise from ships
from four different classes, in experimental runs in an
acoustic range with about 45 meter depth. The noise was
acquired using a unidirectional hydrophone positioned near
the bottom of the range. The received signal was digitized
through an A/D converter with a sampling frequency of
111 - 106
7350 Hz 0-2871Hz
SPECTRA
Fig. 1. 'Block diagram of the: preprocessing performed on
the incoming signal
22050 Hz. Consecutive blocks of this signal were trans-
formed to the frequency domain to obtain amplitude spectra
in the frequency range from IIC to 2.87 kHz [5]. This fre-
quency range was chosen because it contains most of the
frequency lines related to the machines inside the ship and
these lines are known to be quite relevant for the classifica-
tion task [ 13.
Figure 1 shows a diagram of the preprocessing used to
obtain the spectra. First, the signal was filtered and dec-
imated to reduce the sampling frequency to 7.35 kH>!(re-
duction by a factor of 3). Then, consecutive blocks of 1024
points, without overlapping, were passed through a Hanning
window and transformed to the frequency domain by using
the fast Fourier transform (FFT) [6]. For each spectrum
obtained, 400 frequency bins, corresponding to an alias-
free frequency range from 0 to 2.87 kHz,were retained for
the subsequent processing. Each spectrum corresponds to a
time window with about 139 miliseconds duration.
Envisaging the online operation of a practical system, a
neural discriminating analysis [5, 71 was developed over
blocks to compact the high-dimensional (400 point spectra)
input data space. Previous analysis [5] showed that only
four discriminating components are required for classify-
ing correctly more than 93% of the spectra, considering all
classes. In this work, the four components were extracted
using data from three classes. The fourth class was used
for testing purposes only, being considered the "unkn"n"
class to be detected. Preprocessed data (spectra) from all
classes were then projected onto such four discriminating
components, and the resulting projections were the patterns
fed into the input nodes of the neural classifiers.
3.1. Multilayer Neural Network
Pattems from three of the four classes of ships were used to
train and test a multilayer ne:ural network configured with
only one hidden layer (6 neurons), and three output nodes.
All neurons were of the sigmoid type and each output node
was assigned to an input class, so that a target value of +1
was defined for an active node and 0 for inactive ones. The
fourth class was used only in the production phase of the
classifier, in order to test the detection capacity for new
classes.
Figure 2 shows the histogram of each output of the
trained classifier (rows 1 to 3), when the input nodes are
fed with testing pattems of the four ship classes (columns 1
to 4): the three classes for which the classifier was trained
on and the fourth one, simulating an "unknown" class. The
first histogram (first row, first column), for instance, cor-

Fig. 2. A matrix of histograms for the network output for
four ship classes. See text.
responds to the output of the first neuron for the patterns
that belong to the first class. In this histogram, the distri-
butions concentrate near +I, as expected. Considering only
the 3x3 submatrix of histograms (columns 1 to 3, rows 1
to 3), similar behavior is observed for active nodes, when
data from their corresponding classes feed the neural net-
work. The histograms which are not in the main diagonal
represent distributions for inactive nodes with peaks close
to 0, as expected. Thus, such 3 x 3 submatrix points out the
high quality of the classifier performance for the testing set,
when data are projected onto the four discriminating com-
ponents and the classifier is responding for classes that did
participate in the training phase.
The fourth column of histograms in Figure 2 corresponds
to the network response for patterns belonging to the fourth
class (unseen in the training phase). The distributions in
these histograms tend to spread along the dynamic range of
the classifier and do not show evidence of an active response
of any output node. If a decision threshold is defined, so that
only output values exceeding the threshold can be accepted,
most patterns from the fourth class will be outliers and will
not be assigned to any known class.
Figure 3 shows the classification efficiency of the neu-
ral classifier for the testing set, which comprises the three
classes used in the training phase, and the fraction of pat-
terns from the fourth class detected as outliers, for decision
thresholds ranging from 0 to 1. For a minimum classifica-
tion efficiency of 90% for the three classes used for train-
ing, a decision threshold of 0.65 is selected and about 50%
of the patterns from the fourth class are detected as outliers.
The outlier detection efficiency will increase to about 70% if
we allow the minimum classification efficiency for the three
known classes to decrease to 80%.
Since the input patterns that feed the neural network were
computed from samples from different time windows of the
received signal, the corresponding network responses might
be combined to improve the efficiency of a classifier [8].
Thus, a number of consecutive network responses were av-
I11 - 107
Fig. 3. Classification efficiency for the three known classes
and the fraction of patterns of the "unknown" class detected
as outliers. as a function of the decision threshold.
eraged and the fraction of patterns from the fourth class de-
tected as outliers was monitored as a function of the deci-
sion threshold. Tests confirmed that the number of detected
outliers, for a given threshold, increases when the number
of network responses used in the averaging increases too,
up to the limit imposed by process stationarity condition in
the wide sense. On the other hand, the classification effi-
ciency for the three known classes suffers from small fluctu-
ations, with respect to the single response procedure, when
averaged response is considered. Figure 4 shows results for
averaging 10 network responses. For a minimum classifi-
cation efficiency of 90% on known classes, the detection
threshold is set to 0.7 and -85% of the patterns from the
fourth class are detected as outliers.
3.2. Clustering Neural Network
The training phase is developed through a loop of two steps.
In the first, a subnetwork having ART topology is trained for
each known class. The vigilance radii of neurons belong-
ing to a subnetwork are equal and initially fixed, computed
from the peaking value of the distribution of Euclidean dis-
tances among training patterns from the corresponding ship
class. In this way, training classes are first encapsulated
with a combination of neurons having fixed but class de-
pendable vigilance radii. In the second step, each subnet-
work is fed with training patterns from classes other than
that one represented by the specific subnetwork under test,
in order to identify possible invaders to class encapsulation.
For instance, the subnetwork representing the first class is
tested with training patterns from both the second and third
classes. If class invasion is detected, the vigilance radius
of the neuron responsible for the wrong capture of the in-
vader is reduced to a value that keeps the invader out of
the radius of such neuron and thus allowing to recover from
wrong class encapsulation condition. When invasion does
not occur any longer, the first training step of the loop is
performed once more. Now, if a pattern lies out of its class

Fig. 4. Classification efficiency for the known classes and
fraction of patterns of the ”unknown” class detected as out-
liers, as a function of the decision threshold, considering an
average of 10 network responses.
encapsulation, a new neuron has to be added for that subnet-
work and its radius is defined as the distance of the nearest
neuron with respect to that pattern. The training phase pro-
ceeds with such loop of steps and the stopping criterium is
defined by the classification performance for the testing set
[9], which is evaluated by grouping together the trained sub-
networks and making all neurons to compete for each input
pattern.
When using three ship classes in the training phase, the
modified ART neural network achieved a classification ef-
ficiency of 87%. When patterns from the fourth class were
fed into the input nodes of this classifier, -45% of them
were found to be out all class encapsulations and could be
detected as outliers. The averaging of consecutive network
responses was not efficient with the clustering procedure.
If the operator decides that the detected outliers belong
to a new class, then these patterns will be used to update
the neural network. Two approaches may be followed here,
depending on the need of online operation. If this is the
case, the training of the new subclass follows a similar pro-
cedure used to train the classes known beforehand. The out-
lier patterns are used to train the new subnetwork and then
this trained subnetwork is integrated to the complete classi-
fier. To avoid conflict between the encapsulation of the new
class and the previous encapsulations, the radii of the neu-
rons of the new subclass are reduced, eliminating any inva-
sion to the already defined encapsulations. Following such
approach, more than 63% of the patterns from the fourth
class were correctly identified with a minimum decrease in
the classification efficiency for the other three classes (from
87% to 85%).
4. CONCLUSIONS
In this work, multilayer perceptron and modified ART neu-
ral network topologies were applied for the identification of
the noise radiated from ships, which was received by a pas-
I11 - 108
sive sonar system. Preprocessed spectra from contiguous
time windows were projected onto four neural discriminat-
ing components, allowing compact and efficient neural net-
works to,be designed and making online operation feasible.
The neural detection capability was enlarged by developing
a methodology to allow neural classifiers to absorb the ar-
riving of a new class in a practical operation.
When comparing both neural processing approaches de-
veloped for new class detection, it can be seen that the multi-
layer perceptron network achieves better performance, iden-
tifying correctly 87% of the input patterns for classes known
beforehand and up to 85% of the new arriving class, when
experimental data from four clasijes are used.
The clustering network, on the other hand, will include
the newly detected class more easily than the multilayer
neural network. Based on these facts, we are testing a hy-
brid approach where a multilayer neural network is respon-
sible for the classification of the known classes and for the
detection of outliers. When a new class is detected, its pat-
tems are fed into the clustering neural network that will try
to classify them using data from previously detected classes.
If none of those classes corresponds to the newly detected
class, a new class is included in the network. Experimental
results are on the way.
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