“…The motivation was to enhance airborne visual detection of surfaced submarines in the open ocean. Since World War II, the optimal search theory and its corresponding scheduling methods had been further studied, which were related to active or passive detectors including radar [6], sonar [7], optical [8,9], infrared [10], etc. According to the existence of the prior vectoring information, the search scheduling methods can be classified into "search scheduling with prior vect-Manuscript received April 28, 2010.…”