Recent Developments in SOBEK Passive Sonar Technology

Surveillance of waterside locations for protection against threats from small fast surface vessels and underwater intruders is a very relevant but challenging problem. For this reason, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) is developing SOBEK – a family of passive sonar technologies for waterside surveillance. The advantages of passive sonar are several-fold: it is low-cost, it allows covert operation, it is not harmful to underwater life, and the reverberation, which can pose significant challenges for active sonar in confined water, is absent. Furthermore, passive acoustic signatures provide a wealth of information for target classification. This paper presents recent developments in our SOBEK passive sonar research, including new results from a 2011 sea trial in the Dutch Navy harbour of Den Helder, and an overview of future system concepts.