Patent ID: 6980486

Claim:
A method for a bearing tracker that provides estimates for a target's bearing, bearing rate and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) prior to assigning said bearing tracker to said target, said method comprises the steps of: receiving acoustic signals from objects emitting acoustic signals over a band of frequencies; performing a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on the received beams and assigning FFT bin numbers; examining FFT bins of all beams to determine which beam contains a narrowband signal; providing a normalizing process over the band of frequencies of each beam so as to create approximately unit mean data in all frequency bins that do not contain a narrowband signal and providing a normalized beam spectral data matrix therefrom in a three-dimensional array comprising beam/frequency/time; and utilizing the beam spectral data over a limited frequency interval surrounding said narrowband signal to provide said estimates for the target bearing, bearing rate and SNR.