Patent ID: 8189428

Claim:
A computer program product including a computer readable medium having computer program logic stored therein, the computer program logic comprising: logic to cause a processor to receive multiple frequency band sonar data corresponding to an underwater survey of an area, wherein at least a portion of the multiple frequency band data has a sampling rate that differs from another portion of the multiple frequency band data; time-align logic to cause the processor to time-align the multiple frequency band sonar data; logic to cause the processor to convert the time-aligned sonar data to multi-dimensional feature vectors, each feature vector including corresponding multiple frequency band amplitude information and geographical position information; data processing logic to cause the processor to convert the feature vectors to support vector data description (SVDD) data points, to generate a SVDD hypersphere surface from SVDD data points associated with background portions of the area, to identify clusters of SVDD data points that fall outside of the SVDD hypersphere surface by at least a first threshold amount as anomalies, to identify a cluster as a contact when at least a subset of the corresponding SVDD data points fall outside of the SVDD hypersphere surface by at least a second threshold amount, to characterize the contacts based on the SVDD statistics, and to compare the contact characterizations to characterizations of objects previously identified in the area.