Automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ads-b) system providing anomaly detection and related methods

Abstract

An Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) system may include a plurality of ADS-B terrestrial stations, with each ADS-B terrestrial station comprising an antenna and wireless circuitry associated therewith defining a station gain pattern. The system may further include a controller including a variational autoencoder (VAE) configured to compress station pattern data from the plurality of ADS-B terrestrial stations, create a normal distribution of the compressed data in a latent space of the VAE, and decompress the compressed station pattern data from the latent space. The controller may also include a processor coupled to the VAE and configured to process the decompressed station pattern data using a probabilistic model selected from among different probabilistic models based upon a game theoretic reward matrix, determine an anomaly from the processed decompressed station pattern data, and generate an alert (e.g., a station specific alert) based upon the determined anomaly.