Mover and Alert Detection and Hardware Accelerated Target Tracking using Efficient Resources (MAD-HATTER) Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Topic No.: N121-084 Topic Title: Mover and Alert Detection and Hardware Accelerated Target Tracking using Efficient Resources (MAD-HATTER) Proposal No.: N121-084-0073 Firm: Charles River Analytics Inc. 625 Mount Auburn Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138-4555 Contact: Ross Eaton Phone: (617) 491-3474 Web Site: www.cra.com Abstract: Small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have become a critical part of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, supplying valuable aerial imagery to ground forces. Unfortunately, operational ISR is compromised by the stringent size, weight, and power constraints of small UASs, which cannot support real-time processing of imagery nor real-time transmission of high resolution video over limited-bandwidth communication links. Therefore, the potentially game-changing combination of high-resolution ISR and tactical-edge availability has not yet materialized. Our proposed solution is an integrated hardware/software system designed to process high-resolution video data at full video-rate onboard a small UAS. The software performs mover detection and feature-aided tracking, such that only narrow-bandwidth results need to be transmitted back to the user. Our solution employs a revolutionary computing hardware architecture offering several orders of magnitude greater efficiency over conventional processors in terms of throughput vs. power consumption. The key innovation is a slightly reduced precision arithmetic logic unit (ALU) built from just a few thousand transistors, instead of the hundreds of thousands used in modern floating point units. Our simulations show that simple parallel architectures based on these extremely small ALUs run applications 10,000 times more efficiently (faster, or lower power) than modern CPUs and 100 times more efficiently than GPUs. Benefits: Imaging sensors have become increasingly ubiquitous due to a steady decrease in size and cost, making it easier to deploy them on all unmanned systems. The advanced video exploitation routines and extraordinarily efficient computing hardware presented here will have numerous applications in military unmanned systems, and eventually also in widespread products in the consumer electronics markets. Return