FIXATE: FIXational Automatic Target Extraction
Navy STTR FY2014.A


Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2014.A
Topic No.: N14A-T008
Topic Title: FIXATE: FIXational Automatic Target Extraction
Proposal No.: N14A-008-0289
Firm: Scientific Systems Company, Inc
500 West Cummings Park - Ste 3000
Woburn, Massachusetts 01801-6562
Contact: Andrew Browning
Phone: (781) 933-5355
Web Site: www.ssci.com
Abstract: During a mission naval UAS collect large volumes of data but only sub-sections of this data contain information relevant to the mission. In order to find the important information analysts must sift through ALL of the data. FIXATE is a biomimmetic object classification system to automatically pre-process the data and cue the operator to sections of data that are likely to contain important information. This means that analysts can focus on the task at hand rather than manually searching hours and hours of video data. Statistical pattern matching techniques and standard computer science based machine learning have achieved great things, however they have had very limited success with object classification with UAV sensor data. FIXATE builds upon an understanding of how the human and primate visual system processes visual information as a series of fixational eye-movements across objects of interest in order to rapidly detect and classify those objects. SSCI has a track record of delivering biologically derived machine learning systems to DoD through the EVASE SBIR program which is currently being deployed at Edwards Air Force Base. FIXATE builds upon how EVASE cues flight test engineers to sections of flight test video containing important information through customizable pre-processing, and updates it for the purposes of Naval ISR data analysis.
Benefits: FIXATE will reduce the amount of time required to analyze sensor data collected from UAS and in turn increase the volume of data that any analyst can process thereby increasing the likelihood that the mission will be successful. Given the importance of tactical intelligence information to all operations, this will save money and lives on the front lines.

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